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On the Great 
American Plateau 

Wanderings among Canyons and 

Buttes, in the Land of the 

Cliff-Dweller, and the 

Indian of To-day. 



By 

T. Mitchell Prudden 



Illustrated with Photographs, and with Original 
Drawings by Edward Learning. 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 
Ube ftnicfcerbocfeer press 

1906 



fist 
fan 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 24 1906 

Capyriffht Entry 

CLASS/*- XXcNo, 

COPY B. 



COPYKIGHT, 1906 
BY 

T. MITCHELL PRUDDEN 



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Ubc fmtcftetbocfter press, "Hew fijorfc 



PREFACE 

THESE glimpses of the rugged South- 
west country, with its quaint 
aborigines and the ruins of an 
elder folk, already in part have been pub- 
lished in the magazines. They are here 
brought together in the hope that some 
other town dweller, after the rush and 
turmoil of his winter's work, may be led 
to wander away from the beaten tracks 
into the serene and inspiring solitudes 
of this land of wide horizons. 

The writer is indebted to the courtesy 
of the Messrs. Harper and Brothers for 
permission to publish in this form such 
of the material as has appeared in Harper's 
Magazine, and to The American Anthro- 
pologist for consent to similar use of an 
article from its pages. 

T. M. P. 

New York, June, 1906. 



fe 




CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — A Glimpse of the Great 

Plateau i 

II. — Days in the Saddle . . 13 
III. — Old Americans of the Pla- 
teau Country . . 24 
IV. — Under the Spell of the Grand 

Canyon .... 36 
V. — A Little Story of World- 
Making .... 72 
VI. — A Summer Among Cliff 

Dwellings ... 90 
VII. — Primitive American House- 
Builders . . . -137 
VIII. — Forgotten Pathways on the 

Great Plateau . .. 176 

IX. — Across the Plateau by Rail 

and Trail . . . 197 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Sentinels of the Plateau Frontispiece 

A Brown Pagan of the Plateau . 4' 

Horses of all Degrees of Depravity io 

The Mule is Ready .... 14 

A Trail along a Deep Arroyo . 18 < 

A Wayside Home on the Plateau . 22 

A Pueblo of the Hopi ... 26 

A Navajo Hogan . . . 30 ' 
Navajo Visitors in Camp . .34 

Looking across the Grand Canyon . 38/ 

A Long Hot Day .... 44/ 

A Way between Lofty Mesas . 52 

Battlements of the Canyon's Rim . 58 

Upper Ledges of the Canyon Wall 64 < 
Temples and Towers within the 

Grand Canyon .... 68 

The Wily Coyote . . . . 80 
Miles of Gorgeous Pinnacles and 

Buttes . . . . 86' 

The Making of a Navajo Blanket . 96 
Cliff Houses in a Cave . . . 100 



vni 



Illustrations 



i 



PAGE 

Sandals of the Cliff-Dweller . 104 

Skilful Prehistoric Masonry . . 108 

Arrow-Heads, Spear-Heads, etc., of 

the Cliff-Folk . . . .112 

Prehistoric Pictographs . .116 

Pottery of the Cliff-Dweller . 120 

Relics of a Primitive Culture . 128 

A Primitive Lodge on the Face of a 

Cliff ..... 140 

A Prehistoric Burial Mound . -150 

A Great Ruin at the Head of a 

Gulch . . . . i$6 y 

A Cliff Town in Ruins . . .160 

A Row of Cliff-Houses on a Ledge . 164 
A Tower of the Cliff-Dwellers . 170 
A Small Cliff Dwelling in a Cave . 174 / 
A Navajo Sheep Herder and His 

Burros . . . . .184 
A Corner of the Zuni Pueblo . 188 

Homes of the Cave-Dwellers . . 192. 

Daughters of the Desert . . 200 

An Inscription of a Don on El Morro 216 
A Bearer of Water at Zuni . . 222 / 

Hopi Folks ..... 230 
The Accident of Colour and Garb . 234 
Map .... At End , 



On the Great American Plateau 



% 



**.* 



<*> 



On the Great American 
Plateau 



CHAPTER I 

A GLIMPSE OP THE GREAT PLATEAU 

THE Great Plateau of the United 
States west of the Rocky Moun- 
tains reaches far up into Wyoming, 
lies upon the borderlands of Utah and 
Colorado, and broadens southward over 
the upper half of Arizona and the north- 
west corner of New Mexico. 

Multitudes of desolate valleys and can- 
yons have been carved out of this great 
highland, thousands of feet deep in places, 
by unnumbered ages of erosion. These 



XTbe ©teat plateau 



are now almost wholly dry, save when a 
cloud-burst or a storm on the far moun- 
tains sends a mad torrent roaring down. 
The higher regions range from seven to 
eleven thousand feet above the sea, vast 
rugged platforms bordered by winding 
cliffs. Upon some of these, great pine 
forests stretch for hundreds of miles 
guarding their primeval solitudes. 

The tops of many mesas and tablelands 
are clad with dense growths of pinon, 
juniper, and cedar; while on the lower 
levels, uncouth weeds, scattered tufts 
of grass, the cactus, the Spanish bayonet, 
the sage-brush, and the greasewood make 
shift to gather what little moisture they 
may need from the deep recesses of the 
soil. Along some of the stream beds 
great cottonwoods afford a generous shel- 
ter from the sun. In open glades and 
forests here and there quaint brilliant 
flowers in their season smile back a jaunty 



H ffirst (Glimpse 



defiance to the austere earth. In many of 
the broader valleys the sand lies deep or 
drifts in blinding clouds upon the air. 

This land of mighty wind-swept up- 
lands and bewildering gorges, of forest 
and desert and plain, lies to-day almost 
as the Spaniards found it more than 
three hundred years ago. Some favoured 
valleys have yielded to the magic 
touch of irrigation, and small farming 
hamlets nestle beside the waterways. 
Along the line of the few railways which 
have pushed across the plateau in quest 
of the Pacific are widely sundered uncouth, 
villages. But get out of sight of the 
settlements and out of hearing of the 
locomotives, and you are face to face with 
the naked earth as the great sculptors, 
flood, wind, and sand, have left it. 

One might belong to almost any century 
since the world was peopled ; and the folks 
now and then encountered are more than 



TTbe Great plateau 



likely to be brown pagans who still people 
the earth and air with gods of their own, 
live in the thrall of strange superstitions, 
and know the day and its happenings as 
only the out-of-door folk can. To these 
Indians, beasts and plants talk, the wind 
whispers, while the sun and the rain 
study their welfare or plot their undoing. 

The story of this great plateau tells of 
ages in which the world was slowly moulded 
by fire and flood, and carved by the re- 
lentless elements. Dry land was con- 
jured from great interior seas and lifted 
into vast uplands, then torn and tilted 
and gullied as new gigantic rivers sought 
new highways to the sea. Life came and 
traced its records here and there upon the 
pages of the great stone book. 

The vast tableland is dumb anent the 
coming of man. But we find the ruins of 
his abandoned homes all over the southern 
segment of the plateau, straggling out upon 




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H fffrst Glimpse 



its eastern and its western fringes. Cliff- 
dwellers and cave-dwellers, dwellers upon 
the tops of lofty mesas and in snug valleys 
at their feet, all are gone; and their 
crumbling homes are desolate. 

It was not until the Spaniards came 
prying up upon the plateau that the 
Pueblo and other Indians whose descend- 
ants still wander the old pathways were 
dragged, very much against their will, 
out of the languid prehistoric silences. 
Then came the conquests of the Spaniards, 
followed by a quarter of a century of 
Mexican rule. 

At last the Great Plateau, austere as 
ever, is gathered to the fold of the United 
States. Its wayside stories, wild, quaint, 
pathetic, it tells to the wanderer in tune 
with its spirit along its ancient pathways. 
It has received the hunter, the trapper, 
the explorer, into its capacious bosom — 
to return or not as fortune and the Indian 



TLbc 6reat plateau 



willed. The cowboy has spied out its 
fastnesses ; the railway engineer has marked 
in toil and hardship the routes along 
which in later time the streams of life 
and industry and trade surge to and fro. 
The surveyor has projected his lines over 
its arid one hundred and thirty thousand 
square miles. But the Great Plateau 
yields very grudgingly to the touch of 
civilisation. It opens here and there a 
narrow way for the hurrying trains, 
closing its great silences behind them as 
they vanish, then rolls away their pol- 
luting trails of smoke into its vast aerial 
spaces, and falls asleep again. 

The part of the plateau which on the 
whole is most attractive to the seeker of 
adventure in this land of wide horizons is 
that which lies between the Denver and 
Rio Grande Railroad on the north and the 
Santa Fe Railway and the country to 
which it ministers on the south. The 



H fffrst Glimpse 



Santa F6 crosses through the heart of the 
plateau over a region austere and forbid- 
ding enough it is true, from the car window, 
for all its miles of gorgeous cliffs and noble 
forests. But it is so lavish in stories of 
the world's fashioning, so rich in fading 
glimpses of strange old barbarians who 
are gone, so quaintly peopled with kindly 
children of the earth and the sun who bid 
one welcome to homes and firesides where 
for centuries they have foregathered; a 
land withal so alluring for its absolute 
freedom from fret and fume, where you 
and you alone are owner of the day, that 
when once you have broken the link which 
bound you to the rails and head off into 
the dreamy, shimmering mazes which 
lure you on and on, it will be strange indeed 
if you do not for some lucid hours care 
least of all things whether the fortunes of 
the way are ever to lead you back. 

Nothing matters much so long as you 



8 Ubc Great plateau 

can find a little water for yourself and your 
faithful beasts, and a few stray sticks 
to cook your simple fare. Some line of 
curious, brilliant buttes upon the far 
horizon, some faint tradition of a crum- 
bling ruin over the long divide, some 
rumour of an assemblage of the clans in 
ceremonial dances which bridge the years 
between the age of stone and the age of 
steam, or mayhap only the whim to see 
where you will get to if you follow the 
meagre trail winding up the valley, — 
such are the sufficient aims of days and 
weeks of wandering on the Great Plateau 
when once you have forgotten that the 
twentieth century has just begun, and 
have drifted back into the simple days 
and ways before the Spaniards came. 

Remote as are many parts of the Great 
Plateau from the usual lines of travel, 
the tourist may get close to the archaeo- 
logic heart of the land, may see varied 



H jfirst (BUmpse 



phases of native Indian life, and some 
of the most beautiful and the grandest of 
the canyons, through the ministrations 
of established public conveyances and 
the occasional use of a ranchman's team. 

But for the longer journeys into the 
recesses of the plateau, the explorer must 
secure hardy ponies or mules, accustomed 
to forage for themselves on the scantiest 
of herbage, and capable, if need be, of 
sustaining life for a day or two on the 
willow twigs and rank dried weeds of the 
bottoms. The pack is entrusted to mules? 
A canvas wagon-sheet and a blanket must 
serve in lieu of tent and bed. It is no 
hardship, however, in this dry and bracing 
air, to sleep on the ground under the stars. 

Unless one knows the country well and 
is accustomed to the management of 
horses and mules of all degrees of de- 
pravity, it is hazardous to venture out 
upon the plateau and into the Indian 



io Ubc (Breat plateau 

country unattended. Here is elemental 
life, here is genuine freedom; but these 
exalted states are not to be won without 
strict conformity to the inexorable re- 
quirements of the land. Water is often 
very scanty, and usually, to the uninitiated, 
very hard to find; and the ignorant and 
foolhardy can readily die from thirst. 
In the high country the great pines 
sway and sing in the wind at night and 
morning. The pinons and cedars on the 
lower levels murmur fitfully to the passing 
breeze. Small lizards rustle in the dried 
grass as they whisk from your presence. 
Prairie dogs here and there chatter at you 
as you pass. Now and then in the forest 
a mountain lion steals away among the 
pines, or a surprised bob-cat dashes of! 
around the rocks. Deer and antelope still 
feed in the remoter uplands. The mount- 
ain sheep are gone. Bear are seldom 
encountered . As night comes on , the howls 




Q 



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H jfirst (Blimpsc « 

and barks of the wily coyotes circling far 
about the camp are weird and mournful. 
But the great country stretching away for 
hundreds of miles has scarce a human 
habitation, few wild animals and birds, 
and these largely of the still kind. 

It is very hot in the daytime, with the 
sun glaring straight at one from above 
and back at him from the rocks. Perhaps 
there is no shade for twenty miles, except 
under the mules, — and perhaps the mules 
kick. But it is a dry heat which does not 
depress and exhaust ; it stimulates while it 
scorches. 

The nights are always deliciously cool. 
Altogether the wanderer who does not 
mind the wholesome sunburn upon the 
skin, and has a good supply of water, is 
as free and comfortable and happy as good 
mortals deserve to be. How far away 
the great city seems! And for the thou- 
sand unnecessary things which we gather 



12 Ubc Great plateau 

about us in our winter thralldom and dote 
upon, how pitiful are they, if we deign 
to recall them! This is living. We get 
down to sheer manhood, face to face with 
the bare, relentless, fascinating old earth. 
And ever above is the marvellous sky and 
ever a nameless witchery of the air, making 
far things strange and beautiful, and more 
than all else luring the wanderer back to 
these hot wastes year after year. 




CHAPTER II 

DAYS IN THE SADDLE 

ONE day in the saddle in the plateau 
country is much like another, save 
for the ever-changing scene and 
the mild adventures of the way. Before 
dawn the Indian is off to track and bring 
in the beasts, which have been turned 
adrift to forage for themselves through 
the night. 

Now, one by one, jumbled heaps of 
blankets, scattered on the ground, heave 
and shift, and at length disclose each a 
man, who quickly satisfies the modest 
claims of the toilet, and at once gets to 
work at the breakfast. A fire is made, 
the biscuit are baked in an iron pot set 
upon coals with a small fire alight upon 
13 



14 ttbe (Breat plateau 

the lid. The ground is seat and table. 
There is no dallying with the breakfast. 
The mules are packed early, for it gets 
hot right away after sunrise. 

So the beasts get their last sip of water, 
the canteens are filled, and the caravan 
moves off in single file. The gait is 
usually a jog-trot or a walk. The distance 
covered in a day depends upon the situa- 
tion of water along the route. The 
average is from twenty-five to thirty 
miles. 

The march in summer is always 
strenuous in the South-west, because of 
the burning sun. But in the high country 
refreshing breezes are almost always astir, 
and the vast sweep of the vision, the great 
masses of marvellous colour in sand and 
cliff and butte, the matchless sky, and 
the glorious freedom of the life banish 
all thought of hardship, and hide fatigue 
in the inspiration of a careless holiday. 







1 lift 







Stags in tbe SafcMe 15 

We skirt the bases of gigantic cliffs 
which, seen from near and far below, look 
like the sides of mountain ranges. We 
scramble up through rugged gullies to the 
top, and find that they are level plateaus 
scantily clad with soil, and broken by 
shrub and pinon and cedar. The Spanish 
bayonet bristles and great scrawny cac- 
tuses stare at us. The eye wanders off 
to other uplands scored and furrowed by 
gorges of wildest form, and catches still far- 
ther away the shadowy uplift of mountain 
peaks — the Henrys, the La Sals, the Blues 
the Carrisos, San Mateo, the San Francisco 
peaks, and the long dome of old Navajo, 
faint and tremulous through miles of 
shimmering space. 

Away off on the San Juan desert or 
along the barren reaches of the Colorado 
Chiquito, great sand pillars swirl upward 
on the wind and sway and crumble and 
fade, while the under surfaces of fleecy 



1 6 Ube (Breat JMateau 

cloud-banks sailing over their dreadful 
wastes are lurid from the hot reflection 
of the sand. 

We swing across the plateau and slide 
or clamber down again. But with the 
descent of a few hundred feet we are in 
another world. The vision no longer 
revels in those upland spaces which raise 
the spirit into exultant mastery. It may 
be a desperate labyrinth of gorges along 
which now we fare, whose grotesque and 
threatening walls crowd in upon the way 
in stolid, brutal insistence. It may be a 
broad valley with dry, level, grassy bottom, 
and bordered by miles of majestic cliffs 
beset with alcoves here and there, whose 
blissful shadows lure one from the way. 

Perhaps ahead of us the valley narrows, 
the buttressed cliffs forming a gigantic 
colonnade down which we ride, while 
great rock pillars and colossal obelisks 
tower here and there above the walls 



Ba^s tn tbe Safcfcle 17 

gleaming in grey or buff or pink or red 
against the rich blue background of the sky. 

Or the valley opens out upon a sweep 
of sandy plain, its burl and yellow stretches 
beset with billowy masses of the sage, 
now grey, now lilac-tinted through the 
shimmering air, with an elusive purple 
among the shadows of its leaves, which, 
as one rustles by them, fling a faint aroma 
on the air. We look across this tremulous 
stretch of lilac and purple and gold, like 
a brilliant restless sea struck motionless, 
with its waves abreak, to the far horizon 
upon which rise miles of gorgeous buttes — 
white, yellow, purple, orange, and brown — 
all alive with the intense shadows which 
come and go upon their rugged faces. 

Sometimes we drop suddenly out of 
the shimmering spaces of the plain and 
ride for miles along the bottom of huge 
arroyos which the floods have washed out 
of the deep alluvium. 



1 8 Zbc Great plateau 

Now and then the quivering air plays 
strange tricks with the vision as we 
straggle across the sandy reaches of the 
bottoms. In the mirage the cliffs shoot 
up in wavering pinnacles, rock columns 
rise and hang in swaying pointed masses 
above their real selves, then slowly dwindle 
and fade or draw upward and flash out 
of sight. A few times I have seen beauti- 
ful lakes suddenly appear across the trail, 
with foamed-tipped waves breaking in 
silence upon green shores, which glided 
along the burning sand to vanish in a 
breath. 

From the high uplands scudding clouds 
sometimes shoot down long wavering 
shower-slants, which fade at the touch 
of the hot, dry air before they reach the 
earth. One may see afar, or encounter, 
brief veil-like showers, which are con- 
jured into being with never a cloud in 
all the sky. 




Ph 

Q 



Ways in tbe SafcMe 19 

Although continuous rainfall is infre- 
quent upon the wide expanses of the 
plateau in summer, thunder-showers of 
terrific violence sometimes sweep across 
them. And I know of no more severe test 
of serenity of spirit than to face one of 
these in its unmitigated violence. If there 
were but a rock or tree or bush under 
which one could secure at least the moral 
support of a shelter, the strain would be 
less severe. Still one may summon for- 
titude at last to face the rage and fury 
of the wind and rain, and even to exult 
in the flash and roar and clatter of the 
bolts which fall in quick succession all 
about one. When the demon of the 
storm is once in possession, one loses all 
thought of danger, and is fairly regretful 
when at last, with a sudden swish, the 
last pulse of the downpour sweeps by 
and the black chaos goes roaring off. 

But when, as not rarely happens in 



2o Zbc Great plateau 

these violent showers, out of the seething 
alembic hailstones are hurled down upon 
one, neither serenity nor bravado is of 
much avail. He gets black and blue 
welts upon his back and shoulders just 
the same, and the horses go wild with 
terror and pain of the fiendish bombard- 
ment. 

Here and there we come upon ruins of 
the old cliff-dwellers, plastered on the 
faces of the ledges, or atop of dizzy pin- 
nacles of rock, or in sags of the hills, where 
trickling springs may still be found. 
Broken pottery in places litters the ground 
about these ruins, and the old burial- 
places tell in no doubtful fashion, to him 
who knows how to read the story, the age 
and populousness of these long-forgotten 
homes. 

The animals must be well cared for in 
the long, arduous jaunts, no matter how 
man is neglected. Because, in these dry, 



Bass In tbc SafcNe 21 

desolate countries, to be left afoot is to 
face such hardships as few care to risk. 
The horse is fed first, watered first, and 
first unburdened for his rest. How he 
will fare in the night forage is the last 
thing in your consciousness before you 
sleep. How he has fared, the first query 
of the morning. And all day long he is 
your comrade. Sharing thus the varied 
fortunes of the way, you fall into terms 
of intimacy and often affection. 

The animals of the South-west country 
are wonted to long journeys and serious 
hardship. But that which most relent- 
lessly saps the energy and daunts the 
spirit is lack of water. A horse or mule 
may now and then go on for two hot days 
and a night without it; but this may be 
his ruin, for he is apt to lose heart and 
give up if such demands be frequent. 
The men in a small company can carry 
water enough for themselves in canteens 



22 XTbe (Breat plateau 

and a small keg for two dry days. But 
dry camps are not cheerful, and one ought 
to be mighty certain of water of some sort 
before dark on the second night. 

Now and then one rides forward for a 
chat with a comrade; he may beguile 
the way with a song. The Indian strikes 
up some weird refrain; then one shrieks 
at the pack-mules as they stray. But 
the order is mostly single file, and the 
trail is mostly silent. It is a dreamy, 
vacuous life which one slips away into as 
the hot hours pass. He is half conscious 
of the splendid sky and the lengthening 
shadows on cliff and plain as he jogs on 
and on, but the vision of memory is often 
more vivid than the impression of the 
hour. 

So at last we come to the camping-place. 
Sometimes this is in the cozy shelter of a 
friendly cottonwood, or in the lee of a 
gigantic butte towering above the plain, 




4893 




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Ways in tbe Sa&fcte 23 

or in a shallow cave in the ledges of a 
rugged ravine. More often the camp is 
out in the open among the sage-brush or 
where a trickle or puddle or pool of water 
is found. Wherever it may be, there are 
no tents to pitch, nothing necessary but 
forage for the horses, water, a little wood, 
and a few square feet of earth. Drop your 
packs and build a fire and you are at home. 
The horses are hobbled and turned 
adrift, supper is materialised and, if the 
night be at hand, hurriedly and sleepily 
despatched. Each man pre-empts a little 
patch of ground, which he levels off as 
best he can. The blankets are spread 
early, for the nights are always cool; and 
as the stars come out one may see here 
and there the gleam of pipes alight, as, 
half ensconced in his nest, the smoker 
wooes the last and sweetest solace of the 
day before he tastes oblivion. Then sun- 
rise is at hand again. So the days go. 



CHAPTER III 

OLD AMERICANS OF THE PLATEAU COUNTRY 

PEOPLE rarely consider what an 
interesting experiment in the evolu- 
tion of man was going on here in 
America when Columbus set out on his 
crazy adventure across the sea, nor how 
abruptly the experiment ended when the 
white race and the brown race met. For 
most of us the history of America begins 
in 1492. 

We, of course, all have some notion, 
framed partly from fact, largely from 
fiction, of the original possessors of our 
continent. But, after all, I fancy that 
most of us only dimly realise that back of 
the wars which made the country free, 
back of the struggle with forest and soil 
24 



©U> Hmericans 25 

and forbidding wastes which made it 
rich, back of the bold adventures which 
made it known, stretch long ages, in which 
masses of dusky people, from one seaboard 
to the other, lived out their simple lives 
face to face with nature, won their way 
slowly through savagery to barbarism, and 
even here and there began to press eagerly 
through the portals which open toward 
civilisation. 

Then from countries in which mankind 
had started earlier, or had more quickly 
scaled the heights of communal life, came 
the white man. The native advance was 
stayed, and soon the doors were closed 
forever upon a genuine American bar- 
barism just shaping itself into a crude 
civilisation in favoured corners of the 
land. The Old World experiment in 
man-culture was grafted on the New, or, 
more frequently, replaced it altogether. 

But here and there in the South-west 



26 XTbe Great plateau 

some small groups of brown men, called 
Pueblos or village Indians, the wreckage 
of trie abortive experiment in primitive 
man-culture in America, still survive. 
These Indians are mostly in Arizona and 
New Mexico, living in quaint stone or 
adobe houses in far-away fertile valleys. 
jt perched atop of great plateaus. Until 
within a decade or two they lived and 
thought and worshipped Powers unseen 
in just such fashion as they did, and in 
the very places where they were, when 
the Spaniards found them so long ago. 

These Pueblo Indians are not to be 
confounded either with the savages upon 
the Atlantic seaboard or in the eastern 
interior, with whom much of our early 
national history is concerned, nor with the 
nomadic tribes elsewhere in the land. 
Some of them present to-day a significant 
transition phase in the advance of a people 
from savagery toward civilisation, whose 



©l& Bmericans 27 

study is of priceless value in the under- 
standing of the science of man. 

But each year — nay, each month — 
brings new ideas, aims, and needs into the 
simplicity of this native life. Old tra- 
ditions, old customs, old aspirations, are 
fading swiftly and surely in the presence 
of the white man. It is humiliating, not 
only for an American, but for any educated 
human being, to realise that in this great, 
rich, powerful United States, boasting 
ever of its general enlightenment, there 
is neither the intelligent public spirit nor 
the sustained private devotion to the 
wider aspects of science to secure the 
myths and traditions and lore of these 
wonderful people before this page now 
open upon the Story of Man shall be 
closed forever. For nowhere else upon 
this planet does this particular illumining 
phase of human life exist, nor will it come 
again. There are many fields of science 



2 8 Hbe (Srcat plateau 

in which it does not make very much 
difference if the work which is waiting 
to be done shall wait a little longer. A 
decade more or less is of little importance 
in the end. But here delay is fatal. 

The school-houses near the Pueblos, 
the new requirements in food and dress, 
the new conceptions of the world, which 
begins for them to reach out beyond the 
cliffs upon the far horizon — these all may 
be very important to the material welfare 
of such waifs from the past, with the new 
world crowding in upon them. But it 
means the speedy extinction of old cus- 
toms, in life and worship and ceremonial, 
which still are full of the spirit and practice 
of a primitive culture. It means that all 
natural things and happenings in their 
out-of-door world will soon lose their 
spiritual impress, and that the quaint 
myths out of forgotten centuries will fade 
with the old folks who still may cherish 



©l& Bmertcans 29 

them. When such people get on cotton 
shirts, need coffee and sugar, want rum, 
and begin to name their sons after the 
Presidents, they will not continue long to 
send messages to the gods by rattlesnakes, 
nor propitiate the elements by feathers 
and songs. 

The Bureau of Ethnology in Washington 
has done admirable work already . Cushing, 
Bandelier, Lummis, Stephen, Matthews, 
Fewkes, Mrs. Stevenson, Hodge, Holmes, 
Dorsey, and others have rescued much. 
But the work should be more extended, 
more sustained, more amply supported, 
and must withal be quickly under way. 

The surviving Pueblo Indians are widely 
scattered now. There are several villages 
grouped along the valley of the Rio 
Grande and its tributaries, which are 
readily visited from various Santa F6 
railroad towns. The primitive old settle- 
ments, Acoma and Zuni, lie but a few 



30 Ubc Great plateau 

miles off to the south of the railroad, 
while the Hopi villages, far away to the 
north, in the heart of the Great Plateau, 
are at the end of a more strenuous journey 
across the desert. 

The later chapters of this book will 
afford some glimpses of these quaint 
relics of the early Americans and sug- 
gestions of the places from which they 
may be most conveniently reached. 

The Navajo Indians are in many ways 
as interesting as the Puebios, and are 
typical of a quite different phase of abor- 
iginal life, and one which was most largely 
represented in America at the time of 
the discovery. 

The Navajo country lies in the northern 
belt of Arizona and New Mexico and may 
be most easily entered from some of the 
Santa Fe railroad towns upon the south 
or from the Mancos region in Colorado 
on the north. 



©to Hmericans 31 

The Navajo are pastoral folk, herding 
sheep and goats and horses over their 
great arid ranges, raising corn and a little 
grain in the moister bottom lands, living 
in low earth-covered huts, called hogans, 
in the winter, while in the summer they 
build bough shelters or wickiups near 
their fields and stock ranges. They are 
notable blanket weavers, self-supporting, 
and, while nominally confined to their 
great reservation, are scattered out beyond 
its borders in all directions. They have 
been from the earliest times raiders and 
plunderers of the Pueblo and Mexican 
settlements, and are still often aggressive 
and domineering to their neighbours. 

There are rich Navajo and poor ones; 
there are dignified, impressive, noble figures 
among them. Altogether they are among 
the most interesting of the aborigines 
who live in the old fashion, hold to the 
old deities, and maintain a degree of 



32 Zbc Great plateau 

self-respect and independence in the face 
of the blighting influences of civilisation 
which is noteworthy and admirable. 

While the Navajo are peaceable and in 
their fashion hospitable to the wanderer 
whose aims and purposes in their land are 
comprehensible to them or -unsuspicious, 
they will, themselves unseen, keep a close 
watch upon your movements as you ride 
day after day over what seems a tenantless 
waste. 

Sometimes a few lusty, well-mounted 
fellows in gaudy blankets will dash in 
upon your camp, whooping and shrieking, 
draw up a few feet away and sit gazing 
at you, or sternly demand your business. 
It is regarded as good form in the best 
white circles of the frontier to maintain 
for a time under these circumstances an 
air of absolute inattention to this demon- 
stration. It would be as difficult to in- 
dicate the apt moment when you cease 



01& Hmerfcans 33 

to ignore and become aware of the presence 

of visitors, as it would be to write a formula 

for the not more imperative social graces 

of the town. But if you have not winced 

at the startling and uproarious advent of 

your guests, and seem to have business 

and know how to attend to it, your 

visitors will doubtless alight with alacrity 

at your invitation, sometimes without, 

smoke all the tobacco you will give them, 

eat ail that is left of your meal no matter 

how much or of what kind, smoke some 

more, and then silently ride away, or in 

hope of a breakfast camp beside you for 

the night. Time is not pressing to the 

Navajo, and a day with a solid meal and 

tobacco in it is to him a day well spent. 

The Navajo will not tolerate mineral 

prospectors upon his reservation if he can 

help it, for he knows as well as we do that 

the day on which valuable ore shall be 

discovered in his domain is the day which 
3 



34 Ube (Breat plateau 

sounds his doom. So if you can assure 
the Navajo that you are no gold seeker 
in his land, and while insisting upon your 
right to go wherever you choose, are also 
mindful of the rights of the natural lords 
of this desolation, you may drink from 
his springs and water holes; negotiate 
fodder from the meagre patches which he 
tills ; buy a sheep from his flock if you are 
clever at bargaining; watch the women 
weaving blankets in the shadow of a 
scrawny tree or under a summer hut of 
boughs; and now and again you may 
be permitted to stand by at weird dances 
or sit the night out at the uncanny cere- 
monials of the medicine men. 

There are a few Utes still upon their 
dwindling reservation in southern Colo- 
rado, awaiting extinction at the hands of 
a beneficent government. A few Pah 
Utes are scattered in southern Utah and 
northern Arizona. A small remnant of 




..* 



Navajo Visitors in Camp. 



©R> Hmericans 35 

the Havasupai still live upon their farms 
at the bottom of one of the smaller chasms 
which open upon the deeps of the Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado River. On the 
western borders of the great highland, 
the Wallapai are gathered. In the country 
which stretches southward from the pla- 
teau and within the borders of New 
Mexico, the wreckage of the fierce Apache 
is held in qualified durance upon a Gov- 
ernment reservation. But it is especially 
the Navajo and the Pueblo, lingering types 
of the nomadic and the house-building 
barbarian, whom the wanderer upon the 
Great Plateau most often encounters to-day. 







CHAPTER IV 

UNDER THE SPELL OF THE GRAND CANYON. 

THERE were ten of us when we 
started — three white men, one 
Navajo, two horses, one pony, one 
broncho, and two mules. We had been 
busy for several days padding pack- 
saddles, mending blankets, cleaning guns, 
and laying in our stock of food — flour, 
sugar, baking-powder, bacon, rice, oat- 
meal, and dried fruit. 

" Adios!" "Good luck!" and we turned 
our faces westward. It was the Alamo 
ranch of the Wetherills at Mancos, in 
south-western Colorado, the time July, and 
we were off for that glorious plateau 
country through which the great Red 

River of the West has cut a series of 
36 



TTbe (Branfc Cannon . 37 

profound chasms and desolate valleys, 
known to the world as the Canyons of 
the Colorado River. 

People who 'saw the Grand Canyon in 
the early days left the Santa Fe Railway 
at Flagstaff, and after an all-day stage 
ride over a shoulder of the San Francisco 
Mountain, across a small corner of the 
Painted Desert, and through the majestic 
pines of the Coconino Forest, alighted, 
tired but expectant, in a little camp of 
tents close upon the brink of the Canyon. 

To-day the tourist is conveyed by a 
branch of the Santa Fe Railway from 
Williams, Arizona, to a modern, pictur- 
esque, and most comfortable hostelry, El 
Tovar, at the head of the Bright Angel 
trail a few miles below the old camp, 
where he commonly lingers for a day or 
two and then the busy world reclaims him. 
Those who seek the wider outlook upon 
the vast amphitheatre at the head of the 



38 Zbc Great flMateau 

Grand Canyon are carried by stage a 
dozen miles eastward through the great 
pine forest to the quaint and cosy Grand 
View Hotel which fosters longer sojourn. 

But wherever he may be and which 
ever way he came, he who lingers here 
in the presence of this stupendous and 
alluring episode in world-making, sooner 
or later becomes conscious of a haunting 
desire to know what sort of land it is of 
which he catches fitful glimpses across this 
bewildering, palpitating space. No sign 
of a human being ever comes across to you, 
it is much too far for sound, and you wonder 
whether the tiny greenish uplifts upon the 
farther brink can be more than saplings. 
And where does it come from, that broken 
streak of water shimmering between the 
cliffs, and now and then roaring up at you 
on the wind like the great mad river it 
really is, a mile beneath? It seems to 
come out of a red wall some twenty miles 




o 
U 



o 
o 

, 1 



tTbe aranb Cannon 39 

to your right. But over that and across 
a narrow gleam of desert rises a hazy line 
of grey cliffs, with a faint blue mountain 
dome beyond, a hundred miles away. 
Close under this, they tell you, the great 
river is coming down, already buried deep 
between gigantic walls. You follow its 
course toward the west through a maze 
of temples and pinnacles and towers, until 
these merge into the illimitable blue of 
the sky, or are lost in the fading tints of 
sunset. 

This, then, is why our faces are set 
westward. We want to see where the old 
Rio Colorado comes from and where it 
goes. We want to pluck out the heart 
of its mystery in those hidden hundreds 
of miles of awesome gorges. We want 
to wander in the country beyond the 
river which the pioneers have told about 
and where the geologists have conjured 
from the rocks such impressive secrets 



4 o Zbc (Breat plateau 

of the world's workshop. And we want 
to soak in Arizona sunshine and revel in 
Arizona skies, and sleep under the stars, 
which are so bright and clear that they 
cannot be very far away from Arizona. 

The Colorado River is formed by the 
junction of the Green and Grand in 
south-eastern Utah. Its upper foaming 
stretch, running in the Cataract Canyon, 
is about fifty miles long, and from thirteen 
to twenty-seven hundred feet deep. At 
the lower end of this the Fremont River 
comes in from the west. When Powell 
came down the Colorado in his memorable 
exploring expedition, his men were not 
pleased with this tributary, and named it 
the Dirty Devil, a name which in local 
parlance clings to it still. Here the walls 
of the canyon break away on either side 
giving access to the Dandy Crossing. 

Below this the walls close in again to 
form the Glen Canyon, one hundred and 



Ube 6rant> Gannon 41 

fifty miles long, but bordered by lower 
and more broken cliffs. Into this segment 
of the canyon the San Juan River enters 
close at the northern base of Navajo 
Mountain. The Colorado can be crossed 
at three points along the Glen Canyon — 
at Hall's Crossing, near the mouth of the 
Escalante, at the Hole-in-the-Rock Cross- 
ing, near by, and at the Crossing of the 
Fathers — below the entrance of the San 
Juan. These crossings are now little 
used except by miners who pass here to 
reach placer beds along the stream. 

At its lower end the Glen Canyon pierces 
the cliffs, the Colorado receives the Paria 
from the west, and runs for a mile or so 
sedately in the open. Here is Lee's 
Ferry, where a large boat carries across 
the few horsemen and teams which come 
this way. 

But the walls close in again, and for 
sixty-five miles the river is closely bor- 



42 TTbe Great plateau 

dered by cliffs from two to three thousand 
feet high. This is the Marble Canyon. 
At its foot the Colorado Chiquito — the 
Little Colorado — enters from the east. 

From this point until it sweeps out upon 
the desert, more than two hundred miles 
away, the Colorado runs at the bottom of 
a great valley from four to twelve miles 
across, sunk from three-quarters of a mile 
to a mile and a quarter below the surface 
of the great plateau, and bordered by an 
endless succession of vast rock amphi- 
theatres, with gorges and canyons reaching 
a short way back from the valley, while 
from its depths and along its sides rise 
graceful, majestic, tapering buttes in infi- 
nite variety. 

This rock-walled valley of amphitheatres 
and buttes, wonderful in color beyond all 
possibility of description is called the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. 
Here a large tract on both sides of the 



Ube 6ranfc Cannon 43 

river has been sequestered as a National 
Forest Reserve. 

We headed across the Great Plateau by 
way of Bluff City on the San Juan River 
for the Dandy Crossing. 

After nine days of steady travel, across 
arid mesas, down long and burning valleys, 
skirting the brinks of dizzy cliffs, scram- 
bling across gorges, and winding in and 
out among rocks and buttes and pifions, a 
sudden turn of the trail brought us upon 
the crest of a low bluff, with the Colorado 
River at our feet, sweeping on to the 
south. This was the Dandy Crossing, 
and the first sign of humanity since we 
left Bluff City, seven days before, was a 
rough cabin on the far side of the river, 
here about one-eighth of a mile across. 
We drew up the caravan, fired a shot in 
the air and waited. 

Presently three black-clad figures issued 
from the cabin, filed solemnly around in 



44 XTbe (Sreat plateau 

front, and squatted in a row upon the 
ground. Then we both waited. 

The black row brooded motionless. 
Presently we caught faintly, "What ye 
want?" "We want to get across; send 
over the boat. " "They ain't no boat; ye 
can't git over. " 

This was pleasant. The nearest other 
available crossing was ninety miles as 
the crow flies, and full thrice as far as mules 
must go. 

At last we gathered amid the roar, 
"They 's a skiff somers upstream, and 
mebbe ye kin git 'er. " 

So we scrambled for three or four miles 
along the shelving rocks at the river's 
brink, the cliffs towering a thousand feet 
over us, and then stopped, clinging as 
best we could to the last shelf upon 
a wall which rose sheer from the water. 
But we had sighted a hovel on the 
other side, and presently hailed with 




OS 

Q 



o 

X 

be 
o 

H-l 



TTbe (Bran& Cannon 45 

joy a woman clad largely in a sun- 
bonnet. 

" They is an old boatyar, " she shouted 
"but I ain't strong enough to git 'er 
acrost. " 

Night was at hand, so we turned back 
to a less precipitous place where our stock 
could forage, made camp, and sat in 
council. 

The river is big, it is broad, it is muddy, 
it is swift, and even in its quieter places 
sullen and forbidding. Great smooth 
swirls come and go upon its surface; it 
swishes viciously past the rocks and bushes 
on the brink. And it has a bad reputation. 
It drowns people and it drowns stock. 
It often claimed, but fortunately lost, 
tribute from Major Powell's plucky little 
company in 1 869. Nothing short of human 
life appeased it when Colonel Stanton and 
his men went through the canyons twenty 
years later. The folks who know it best, 



46 XTbe 6reat plateau 

the cattlemen and the miners, dread and 
hate it. "She's a durned, cussed, ugly- 
devil, and ye 'd best not monkey with 'er, " 
said one of our native councillors who 
knew. 

But we thought that we would make 
an attempt anyhow, so one of our number 
mounted our veteran horse and plunged 
in. There was splashing and turmoil 
in the water, horse and man disappeared, 
and when, in a few seconds, the rider was 
dragged ashore in grieved surprise, and 
the horse scrambled up the bank a hundred 
yards below, trembling and snorting, we 
were ready to concede that the task before 
us was not what in the juvenile vocabu- 
lary would be called a " cinch. " Then 
we had supper, and slept upon the situation 
— and the rocks. 

In the morning, one of us crawled 
around the cliff and along the boulders far 
up the bank, secured a stranded log, and 



Zbe <3ran& Cannon 47 

floating and swimming with the current, 
finally reached the other side. 

The boat was an old ramshackle, leaky, 
flat-bottomed, ten-foot skirl, with patched 
and clumsy oars, but in small loads we 
got our saddles and packs across, and then, 
after a careful reconnoissance of the banks 
on both sides for a safe entering-place 
and landing, we tackled the stock. 

None of our animals had been tried in 
deep and rapid streams. Indeed, neither 
they nor our Indian, both children of the 
desert, had ever before seen so much 
water. It was evident from our first 
attempt that if we pushed them off into 
deep water to take their chances, the 
animals would either scramble back again 
or drown. The only thing to do was to 
tow them over, one by one. This would 
have been a more agreeable undertaking 
if the oars had been less nondescript in 
form and less fragile, if the boat had 



48 XEbe (Breat plateau 

leaked in fewer places and in less aban- 
doned fashion, and if she had n't threat- 
ened to fall to pieces every time the 
oarsman pulled unequally upon the sides. 

It would make a long list if one were to 
set down all the surprising things which 
a horse or a mule will undertake to do 
when, with a rope around his neck, held 
in the boat a rod or so off shore, he is 
suddenly pushed off a steep bank into deep 
water. He tries to go to the bottom first, 
but he is too buoyant for success at that ; 
then he tries to get back to the bank, but 
the rope pulling from the boat and shouting 
men ashore brandishing clubs discourage 
that. He surges right and left, he snorts, 
he splashes, he groans, and when at 
length he realises that he can't possibly 
get ashore again, he concentrates all his 
hitherto diverse purposes into a fixed 
intention to get aboard the boat. 

He has now been hauled close astern, 



Ubc <&vanb Cannon 49 

and has lost all notion of the shore. The 
oarsman meanwhile is pulling madly 
toward the other bank, the whole circus 
sweeping every second down the stream. 
With every lurch upon the rope the joints 
in the crazy craft open, and the Colorado 
River seems determined to get aboard 
along with the horse. Floundering up 
and down in the struggle to raise his 
fore feet over the stern, his knees thump 
against the outside of the boat. He swims 
first around one side, then around the 
other, as far as the short rope will let him 
go. He rolls on his side as a vicious 
whirl in the water catches him, and seems 
to lose his bearings. His eyes bulge, his 
breath grows short, he groans rather than 
snorts, and at last, when the man sitting 
astern with the rope raises his nose over 
the thwart, with a great sigh he gives 
up and swims along behind, blowing 
and purring and with strained eyes, but 



so tTbe (Breat JMateatt 

quietly and smoothly. The fight is 
over. 

In this lull in the panic we secure evi- 
dent recognition of words of cheer and 
encouragement with which, even in mid- 
stream, we strive to re-establish claims 
to friendliness and good-will so rudely 
strained by the deep damnation of that 
pushing off. 

Presently the boat begins to slew 
around. The oarsman cannot keep her 
on the course headed for a rocky point 
far down the stream upon which and 
nowhere else the landing must be made, 
because of quicksand at every other 
place. It is evident in an instant that 
the beast has caught sight of the far 
shore, and regardless of the boat, is head- 
ing for it. So the rope is payed out and 
let go, and he bears away gallantly for the 
point. 

It was fortunate that the first horse 



Ubc (Branfc Cannon 51 

which we piloted thus across let us drag him 
nearly all the way, because we secured 
for him the proper landing, where he and 
the others, as one by one they joined him, 
stood as landmarks for those which were 
to follow. We had a distinct and varie- 
gated campaign with each animal, but the 
lines of the story fall much the same in 
all. At last we got them safely over, 
and gratefully returned in one piece the 
gallant craft which saved the day. We 
had lost a few illusions about the ease 
of primitive travel on the frontier, but 
we had gained a distinct preference 
for bridges, and we had conquered the 
Colorado. 

Then we head away westward again up 
the nearly dry, rough wash of the Crescent 
Creek or Lost Gulch, and are soon out 
upon the plateau close to the eastern 
slope of the Henry Mountains. We skirt 
the northern spurs of the Henrys, entering 



52 XTbc ©reat plateau 

the midreaches of the Dirty Devil Valley 
among outlying Mormon settlements. 

Now, day after day, the way leads west 
and south through great gashes in the ledges 
of lofty plateaus, past cliff-girt mountain 
vales, up the long stretches of the Sevier, a 
river whose waters never reach the sea. At 
last we climb the height which divides 
the waterways leading back to the salt- 
lake basins of Utah from the summit 
sources of the Kanab and the Virgen, 
children of the great Colorado. 

As we cross the divide we are between 
two great tables which rise a thousand 
feet or more above us to the right and 
left. These are the Pansagunt and the 
Markagunt plateaus, standing nine and 
ten thousand feet above the sea. 

The Kanab Creek has cut a rough 
winding gorge down through the cliffs and 
terraces which mark the descent from 
the high plateaus southward to the great 





as 
en 

O 

56 

;>> 

■s 



Ube ©ran& Cannon 53 

bench of the Colorado. In this we clamber 
down the marvellous series of terraces 
sloping upward to their edges, clearing 
at a leap ledges which it took a thousand 
or perhaps a hundred thousand years to 
build, and as many more, mayhap, to 
wash away again. How we and our 
mules flaunted our heels in the face of 
Time that day! 

If we were geologists, we should check 
the ledges off as we descend — Eocene, 
Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and out 
upon the Permian. But being just com- 
mon folks, they may be for us the Pink 
Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs, Brown 
Cliffs. I will not try to describe their 
majesty, nor the weird forms and the 
gorgeous colours with which in the lower 
series they are glorified. At last we come 
down upon the lowest of the terraces, the 
Vermilion Cliffs sweeping away right and 
left, and into the little hamlet of Kanab, 



54 Ube (Breat l^tateau 

the last Mormon outpost in southern 
Utah, close upon the northern line of 
Arizona. 

The Grand and Marble Canyons cut 
the north-western corner of Arizona com- 
pletely off from the rest of the Territory. 
Except by Lee's Ferry, and the long, hot 
road which leads to it, or by a far western 
route, this corner is inaccessible from the 
south. It looks small enough upon 
the map, but it is rather larger than the 
State of Connecticut, and save for a few 
scattered cattle-shacks, has no human 
habitation. 

Over the middle and western portions 
of this barren northern Colorado bench, 
where in five thousand square miles there 
may be a dozen springs and fickle water- 
pockets, bands of wild horses roam, 
defying pursuit, worrying more docile 
stock, and eating grass and drinking 
water which are none too plenty for 



Zbe Otnnb tfangort 55 

cattle and for better mannered horses. But 
a fine show these splendid creatures make 
of it when, from ten to fifty in a bunch, 
they catch sight of an outfit like ours 
and line out for a run. 

For the next two weeks we wander over 
this stretch of the plateau which lies 
along the northern side of the Grand 
Canyon, among extinct volcanoes, across 
sinister lava flows, and along dry shallow 
water courses, which once were tributary 
to the Colorado River, while it too was a 
broad leisurely stream before the carving 
of the great inner gorge. 

Lying along the whole eastern side of 
this district and forming a large part of 
the most imposing segment of the northern 
wall of the Grand Canyon and the western 
wall of the Marble Canyon esplanade, is 
the Kaibab Plateau, or Old Buckskin, as 
hereabouts it is familiarly called. It is 
the Kaibab which looms up before the 



56 tTbe (Sreat plateau 

tourist on the southern side of the Grand 
Canyon as he stands upon the brink at 
El Tovar or the Grand View Hotel. It is 
from seven to nine thousand feet above 
sea level, stretches a hundred miles north 
and south, and at its widest is somewhat 
more than thirty miles across. 

We now turn to the great Kaibab. 
Everybody had told us that it is a para- 
dise up there in the forest, and we found 
it true. There one may wander for days 
in an open forest of noble pines ; or along 
exquisite glades, green-bottomed, where 
the quaking aspen cheers the eye, and 
edged with the delicate spires of spruce 
and fir. Bright flowers bloom in long 
forest-sequestered parks. One may even 
hear water gurgle here and there among 
the rocks, a sound not very common in 
Arizona. Deer are plenty and very tame. 
We chased them among the trees as one 
might runaway cows. But as we were not 



ttbe 6rant> Cannon 57 

out to kill things we left them mostly to 
their own devices. 

However pleasant it may be, after the 
hot weeks of travel in the open, to loiter 
tinder the pines and among the glades 
in the heart of the Kaibab, one cannot 
long resist those hazy glimpses caught 
here and there between the trees into far 
blue depths upon which shadowy outlines 
of temples and minarets, and nameless 
dreamy masses in soft rich colours, float 
and gleam. However deep in the forest 
or cosy beside the camp fire at the edge 
of one of those matchless glades, the spell 
of the great abyss hovers about one and 
lures him to its side. 

We ride for a day and crawl over upon 
a great peninsula of rock — Powell's Plateau, 
they name it — which looms above the 
heart of this under-world, and revel in 
the vision. We ride and camp and ride 
again out and out for miles to the last 



58 XTbe (Breat plateau 

rock pillar which stands poised on Point 
Sublime, and linger hour after hour in the 
thrall of a waking dream. 

Then away we go again — for it makes 
one restless, this mighty thing of trans- 
cendant beauty — and after many miles 
reach a towering promontory around 
which the river makes a great curve as it 
emerges from the Marble Canyon and 
sweeps into the vast chambered space 
below. This is the vantage-ground, lo- 
cally known as Greenland Point, infre- 
quently visited by parties of the nearest 
Mormon villagers for a view of the Grand 
Canyon. Two projecting cliffs upon this 
point, known to the geologists as Cape 
Royal and Cape Final, loom up across 
the Canyon from Grand view. 

When Major Powell and his men came 
floating down the river they seemed a 
little remorseful for the mood in which 
the Dirty Devil had been named, and as 







Battlements of the Canyon's Rim. 
As seen from the Colorado River. 



Zbc 6ranfc Cannon 59 



they reached the mouth of a side canyon 
a few miles below our Greenland Point, 
whence issues a sparkling brook, they 
were inspired to call it the Bright Angel. 
The new hotel, El Tovar, at the terminus 
of the railroad, looks up this winding 
gorge from the southern rim of the Grand 
Canyon, a dozen miles away. 

It was at a little spring close under 
the edge of the summit ledges in which 
this happily christened streamlet finds its 
source that we lingered longest in camp, 
loath to relinguish the shelter of the noble 
forest and lose the glimpses of wonderland 
down through the corridor of cliffs and 
towers which the Bright Angel has fash- 
ioned in its mad rush to the bosom of the 
Colorado. 

But there are hundreds of hot miles 
between us and home, and so at last, 
after some days of forest wandering, 
we turn our faces toward the eastern 



60 Zbc (Breat plateau 

facade of the Kaibab, heading for Lee's 
Ferry. 

Here we secure a small boat and work 
our way toilsomely up into the lower 
boxes of the Glen Canyon, trying to 
realise as we drift back again, the toils 
and dangers and recompenses of those 
who have floated through all the long 
stretches of the canyons — Powell and 
Stanton with their parties, the story of 
whose explorations has been told in most 
complete and entertaining fashion by 
Dellenbaugh, himself one of the bold 
adventurers, in his Romance of the Colo- 
rado River. 

From the ferry crossing one looks down 
upon the upper reaches of the Marble 
Canyon, its walls steadily rising until they 
close in perspective over gloomy depths. 

It is a thirsty ride of seventy-five miles 
along the Echo Cliffs from Lee's Ferry 
to water at the trading-post at Willow 



XTbe Oranfc Cannon 61 

Springs, whence the way leads on to the 
Mormon city of Tuba, now a Navajo 
agency, and to the Pueblo Indian ranches 
in the valley of the Moencopie. 

I have not woven into my wayside 
narrative the human interests passing 
in and out through the story of the scarred, 
insistent earth which so inevitably domi- 
nated our waking hours. But we stopped 
beside forlorn hovels, whose Mormon 
inmates had memories clear enough of 
better times in other lands, and hopes 
pathetic and dim of a brighter day for 
the Chosen, Cattle-men, weeks from the 
sight of other faces, were glad to leave 
their lonesome cabins among the pines 
and ride for miles beside us to hear our 
story and to tell their own. Dusky 
forms, mostly of Pah Utes and Navajos, 
would dash out upon us or suddenly 
materialise at our camp fires in the re- 
motest places, and in mutual stares and 



62 Ubc Great plateau 

smokes and pantomine we always won 
our way to good fellowship and confidence. 

From Tuba the way is not far to the 
eastern fringe of the Coconino Forest, 
and across the uplands to the range of the 
tourist and the hotels at the Grand 
Canyon, whence we were lured at the 
beginning of this chapter by glimpses of 
the land beyond. 

The Cataract, the Glen, and the Marble 
Canyons, and that portion of the Grand 
Canyon which lies below Powell's Plateau, 
are gorges of overpowering grandeur, but 
they are perfectly comprehensible. When 
one has won his way along and across them, 
and now in sun and now in shadow has 
studied their sombre walls, he can easily 
enough describe them and recall better- 
known canyons and gorges which serve 
fairly well by comparison to illustrate 
their extent and majesty. But face to 
face with this other, comparisons are 



Ubc <3rattf> Cannon 63 

futile, and figures and estimates seem 
impertinent. Each change of season, each 
new day, and every passing hour reveals 
new elements of grandeur in the cliffs, 
fresh phases of transcendent beauty in 
their colours. 

The great Canyon is shy of the camera, 
and the marvellous blue haze, now lumi- 
nous, now faint, now shot with purple 
as the light falls red upon it at sunset, 
is always there holding its reserve in- 
violate. Single cliffs and towers of rare 
strength and beauty may be secured 
upon your films, but the Canyon never. 

The first white men to look upon the 
Grand Canyon were some old Spaniards, 
who went out from the Moqui villages in 
1 541. A few of them scrambled down 
the cliffs a little way and took a world 
of satisfaction, when they got back, in 
pointing out to their wiser comrades who 
had staid above, some pinnacles of rocfe 



64 TLbc Great plateau 

partway down apparently as large as a 
man, but which they triumphantly de- 
clared were bigger than the great tower 
of Seville. 

Major Powell, who knew the Colorado 
well, says impressive things, in very 
charming fashion, about the Grand Canyon. 
But he finds the task perilously exacting, 
and at last, yielding to the frenzy of 
comparison, plucks up Mount Washington 
by the roots to the level of the sea, and 
drops it head first into the abyss, calling 
you to witness that the waters still flow 
between the walls. Anon the Blue Ridge 
is plucked up and even hurled into the 
canyon; but there is room aplenty still. 

Charles Dudley Warner, wearying of 
description, stows away the Yosemite in 
an inconspicuous side gorge, and defies 
you to find it. Then he summons dreams 
of the Orient, calls Babylon back across 
the years, fixes his eyes upon a far, aerial 




Upper Ledges of the Canyon Wall. 
On the Grandview Trail. 



XTbe 6rant> Cannon 65 

heaven which fades at last into visions 
of the New Jerusalem, and so, altogether, 
comes off with flying colours from his 
skilful, lusty tilt with the impossible. 

A wise and sympathetic, as well as 
learned description of the Grand Canyon 
and its adjacent country is that of Captain 
Dutton, unfortunately buried for most 
readers in a bulky report. — Vol. II. — of 
the United States Geological Survey. 

After all, one may be glad if he can win 
the conviction that in a world so strenuous 
with obvious duties and conscientious 
impulses, no man has got to describe the 
Grand Canyon. 

But if one would really know it he must 
not hasten away. Many interesting jour- 
neys along its borders, afoot and ahorse, 
are feasable from the hotels, especially 
from Grand View. One may ride from 
Grand View north-eastward for sixteen 
miles among the pifions of the Coconino 



66 Ube <3ran& Cannon 

Basin and peer into the shivery depths 
of the narrow gorge through which the 
Little Colorado sinks into the arms of 
its big brother from the scorching sands 
of the Painted Desert. 

One may visit little groups of cliff houses 
in the gullies which lead from the basin 
up into the northern fringes of the forest 
or along the summit ledges of the great 
valley. One can grope his way into lime- 
stone caves far down the cliffs, or may 
wander for miles along the brink of the 
canyon, winding in and out to head the 
vast amphitheatres which face the abyss, 
picking up old arrow-heads and frag- 
ments of archaic pottery. 

A ride of some sixty miles south-westward 
will bring one to the bottom of the canyon 
of Cataract Creek, where a dwindling 
relic of the Havasupai Indians awaits 
extinction in poor wickiyups among their 
meagre corn-fields and melon-patches. 



Zbc (Bran& Cannon 67 

It is not easy, where every outlook is 
sublime, to select a single point upon the 
canyon's brink of which one can say, this 
is, after all, the best. 

The outlook from El Tovar or from 
the points near by is impressive, almost 
overpowering, because one gets here his 
first glimpse which is straight down into 
the vast abyss. 

One of the most comprehensive views 
is a long, high spur on the south side, 
some miles below the railway terminus 
and accessible from Bass's camp. This 
looms far out over the deeps between 
two mighty gulfs and commands a stretch 
of many miles of the Canyon on either 
side. 

The outlook from Grand View is, how- 
ever, in many respects the most alluring 
of all since it commands from the highest 
point upon the southern rim, not only the 
vast amphitheatre at the entrance of 



68 Ube Great plateau 

the Little Colorado, but glimpses of the 
Painted Desert, the Marble Plateau, Echo 
Cliffs, and the exquisite dome of Navajo 
Mountain, upon the far northern horizon. 

Do not go before you have seen the 
great valley filled to the brim with seething 
billows of cloud, and watched their fading 
under the touch of the early sun. You 
must see a shower march across the vast 
spaces below, leaving trails of heightened 
colour upon the streaming faces of the 
cliffs. From above you should see the 
night close in, and strain the eyes to catch 
the outline of familiar forms grown faint 
and far and strange. And when the 
moonlight falls full into the depths, say 
if you can that down there it is still a 
part of the earth you know. 

You should scramble down the trails 
and learn that it is a real river foaming 
and tossing over the rocks. But you will 
not win your way to the inmost spirit of 



tTbe <Branfc Cannon 69 

the place unless you spend a night alone 
down in those awesome chambers — as 
far out of the world as you can get, it 
seems, and still hold the link intact. 

The going out of the day from your 
seclusion and the splendour of the world's 
night far above you, the unearthly sweep 
of the moonlight across the faces of the 
awful cliffs which hem you in, and the 
coming of the morning, ushered in upon 
your solitude in mysterious fashion from 
some invisible source — these and the mem- 
ory of a hundred weird happenings of 
the night, which I may not linger to set 
down, will seal the enchantment when, 
again stretched in the friendly shade of 
some gnarled old cedar close upon the 
brink, you let the hours slip by in dreamy 
visions which each moment weaves afresh 
out of the mass and colour of cliff and 
pinnacle and gorge and their veil of 
ethereal blue. 



16 Zbc (Breat plateau 

So at last we have learned where the 
old Colorado comes from, and have seen 
it sweeping through dwindling gorges 
out to the desert of the far South-west. 
The mystery of the country beyond the 
river has been merged in pictures of a 
summer holiday. We know that those 
tiny uplifts over there upon the farther 
brink are not the puny twiglets which 
they seem, but gigantic pines, through 
whose swaying tops the wind moans and 
sings. We could even prove, "an we 
would, " out of its miles of splendid cliffs, 
that the Grand Canyon is, indeed, the 
masterpiece of world sculpture. But when 
the last is said, the spirit, as at the first, 
is swayed most of all by its elusive, un- 
earthly beauty. Perhaps Mr. Warner, 
after all, was wise to drop halting phrases 
and turn to visions of the New Jerusalem. 

Our way homeward leads past the 
Hopi villages, where we linger through 



tLbc (fcranb <£an£drt 71 

the weird ceremonial of the snake-dance 
at Walpi. Thence the hot trails lead us 
for eight days over the wide stretches 
of the Navajo reservation, around the 
western spur of the Carriso Mountains, 
across the San Juan River, along the 
western front of the Mesa Verde, in whose 
recesses the cliff-dwellings are concealed. 

And so we straggle into the ranch. 
There still are ten of us, but it is in part 
another ten. For of the six sturdy, 
willing beasts which started on the way, 
only two have weathered the privations 
and hardships of the thirteen hundred 
toilsome miles which make up the record 
of our summer wandering. 

The hardships of the way are soon 
forgotten, but in the lulls of busy life the 
memory is fain to conjure back the spell 
of those serene deeps, which woven once, 
nor time nor space shall ever break. 



CHAPTER V 

A LITTLE STORY OP WORLD-MAKING 

IF one lingers for a while beside the 
stream of tourist travel which surges 
in to the Grand Canyon at El Tovar 
stares, exclaims, gasps, squeaks, chatters, 
even weeps sometimes, and then slips 
back whence it came, he will hear first 
and last a great deal about how the 
Canyon "happened." 

One may read all about it and more 
too, in the descriptions of passing news- 
paper correspondents diverted for a day 
from the main line of the Santa F6 at 
Williams. These are, however, not in- 
frequently so bathed in an atmosphere of 
personal impression and so charged with 

more or less lurid comparisons that signi- 
72 



ficant details are lost. Many learned trea- 
tises on the geology of the Canyon are 
quite accessible. But the temptation is 
strong to sum up the opinions of the ex- 
perts in simple fashion for the visitor who 
seeks the story for itself but likes his 
science tempered to the spirit of his 
holiday. 

If I venture here to tell the story of the 
Canyon's making in simple impersonal 
fashion I must assume that the reader 
has already wandered to and fro at leisure 
upon the "rim, " that we have made our 
way down the colossal terraces by one of 
the well made trails, preferably at Grand 
View, and have come at last to the camping 
place upon a great sand bar beside the 
river. We dispose of our frugal meal as 
the night creeps in upon the vast abyss 
and its chambered recesses. We have 
made a fire of river driftwood, and here, 
if ever, the grim walls looming far up on 



74 Ube 0reat plateau 

either side, a clear-cut strip of starry sky 
between, and the swirl and roar of the 
river close at hand, is the time and place 
for a story. 

There are so many kinds of story which 
a camp-fire invites that one might hesitate 
in choice. But the spirit of the situation 
and the hour lead most directly to a 
sober tale of world-making which geolo- 
gists have read out of the stone story- 
book opened wider in this land of the 
great plateaus than almost anywhere 
else on earth. 

I have upon my writing-table, holding 
down a pile of unruly papers, the oldest 
relic of America which human eyes have 
ever rested on. It is a rough fragment 
of rock which I broke off from a long, 
low granite ridge, a part of which is 
now called the Laurentian Hills in 
Canada — the first land to emerge from 
that universal, shoreless sea which 



MorR^/toafefna 75 



once swept unhindered round the 
earth. 

After the appearance of my paper- 
weight — the avatar of the North American 
Continent — some scattering rock islets 
and ridges got their heads also into the 
sunlight here and there, along the line 
of the Appalachian chain, among the tips 
of the Rockies, and over the central and 
northern regions of the future great 
republic. 

Then these rock islands, and others 
which the throes of the uneasy earth sent 
up to join them, and the shallow bottoms 
here and there, were pounded through 
ages by resistless seas, and powdered and 
weathered into boulder, pebble, sand, and 
silt. This wreckage filled in the borders 
of the land, and slowly built up, layer by 
layer, the bottoms of the interinsular 
seas. The layered ruin of the earlier earth 
was then baked by plutonic fires into new 



76 tLbe (Breat plateau 

rock, and again became the sport of the 
elements, and took new forms and places 
in the earth's foundation. 

And so, after never mind how many 
millions of years, the continent of North 
America grew into some semblance of its 
present form. But for a long time the 
South Atlantic seaboard was under water; 
Florida was not; and what now we call 
the Gulf of Mexico sent a deep bay 
up the Mississippi half-way to the Great 
Lakes; while a vast inland sea, the Medi- 
terranean of early America, stretched 
north-westward from the Gulf across the 
Rocky Mountain country, over the region 
of our great plateau, and far on toward 
the Arctic Ocean. 

Just here the sequence of events grows 
dim as centuries file along. At any rate 
the great inland sea was gradually filled 
by the wash from its shores and by the 
water-borne wreckage of the hills in the 



XKHorlfc^flDafctng 77 

back country. Then it lost its connec- 
tion with the sea, and became a vast fresh- 
water lake, or chain of lakes, with rather 
unstable bottoms, which rose and sank 
as the earth's crust bent and wrinkled. 
The shores and depths of this new lake 
were haunted by strange living crea- 
tures. 

Finally the whole basin got filled up and 
dry, except for the water pouring down 
out of the northern hills. Thus a great 
new drainage area was formed, which 
headed far in the crumpled mountains to 
the north, and stretched off south-west- 
ward toward a mighty arm of the sea, of 
which the Gulf of California is the dwin- 
dling relic. This drainage area became 
in time the plateau country, and the new 
watercourse, the Colorado River, so nois- 
ily in evidence beside our camp, forswore 
its inherited fealty to the Atlantic, long 
maintained through the Gulf of Mexico, 



78 TTbe Great JMateau 

and henceforth paid loyal tribute to the 
Pacific. 

Please remember that I am just telling 
the story as I have gleaned it from the 
students of the rocks in book and lecture 
and in far-off camps among the hills. 
So if a million years or so should slip 
away unheeded in my tale, or if the 
shores of nameless, vanished seas should 
in my memory break in wider beach-lines 
or a little farther inland than in fact 
they did, I claim the license of way-side 
narrative. 

It is tiresome to try to conceive of the 
long reaches of time during which this 
great inland sea was filling up, and it is 
fortunate that the geologists who deal in 
such lordly, lavish fashion with the years, 
handling them in parcels of a few millions 
or a hundred millions or so, finally lump 
them together under ages — Carbonifer- 
ous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Creta- 



WorR^/IDaftina 79 

ceous, etc., names which are not insist- 
ent in the suggestion that they were, after 
all, made up of hours and minutes, which 
only one by one have slipped away. 

But if you go out into the plateau coun- 
try five hundred miles from any ocean you 
will not doubt this inland sea. For you 
may ride for hours along shaly rock escarp- 
ments on which the ripples of the ancient 
shores are as plain and plenty as ever 
you saw them on the Jersey coast. You 
can pick up shells too, which at least sug- 
gest clams, stone though they be to-day. 

In the northern part of the plateau coun- 
try, now cut off from the rest by the 
Uintah Mountains, the bones of monkeys 
and crocodiles, of birds with teeth and 
three- toed horses, of sea-serpents — honour 
bright, I appeal to Marsh and to Osborn — 
and of a motley lot of named and name- 
less uncouth, ludicrous beasts, are piled 
pell-mell together in the washes, or half 



80 Ube Great plateau 

buried in banks and cliffs and weathered 
buttes which once were the shores and 
bottoms of our slowly shoaling inland sea. 
It is a pleasant memory which lingers 
with the writer, of an undergraduate 
summer spent in this region under the 
tutelage of Professor Marsh, who was so 
wise in the lore of these crumbling hills. 
Most vivid of all, perhaps, is the recol- 
lection of a long, hot week whose day- 
light hours were spent alone astride the 
shelving edge of a low weathered butte, 
with hammer and stone-chisel, pecking 
away the rock around the fossil head 
of a preposterous beast, something like 
a crocodile, I fancied, which once had 
floundered about in that old inland sea. 
Every day, as soon as the click of the 
chisel began, three huge grey wolves 
came peering over the edge of the bluff 
a hundred feet or so above me, and 
here they stood, alert, but silent, all 




The Wily Coyote. 



Moctt^/I&akina 81 

through the hot day. A hallo and a 
sudden wave of the hand would send 
them scampering off, but presently they 
were there again, attentive as ever to 
the strange thing below. It was a far 
cry back from my contemporaries upon 
the bluff, who seemed to have very 
little business of their own on hand, to 
the old inhabitant at my feet ; and though 
we had n't much in common, we all 
got on very well together, and parted 
friends. 

But I have lingered behind my story, 
for we have seen the old inland sea rilled 
up, and a new great river, which will 
some day be the Colorado, sweeping down 
from the northern regions on its way to 
the Pacific. This stream bore great floods 
of water, and began to gather enormous 
quantities of eroded stuff from the lake- 
beds over which it passed. So that after 
this great basin, covering an area of con- 



$2 TTbe (Breat plateau 

siderably more than a hundred thousand 
square miles, had been filled in, layer by 
layer, some two or three miles deep, at 
such an inordinate cost in mountains and 
at such a reckless expenditure of time, 
and the stuff had all got nicely packed 
and settled into good solid earth crust, the 
whole thing began to wash out again, to 
make new land somewhere else. 

I don't know where it all went to, but in 
the later periods, at least, a vast amount 
went down the Colorado. But gone much 
of it is, especially of the upper strata, as 
you might see for yourself if you went 
over into southern Utah and northern 
Arizona, into the land beyond the Great 
Kaibab of which we caught some hasty 
glimpses in the last chapter. 

You would get up on top of some of 
the upper strata of the rock which filled 
the inland sea, now forming what are 
known as the High Plateaus of Utah, 



Worl&*flDafefnG s 3 

and bear off south toward the river. 
You would come off from these between 
the Markagunt and the Pansagunt, down 
a series of gigantic steps hundreds of feet 
high, each the edge of one of the old upper 
layers, left exposed in miles of gorgeous, 
fantastic cliffs by the wear and tear and 
wash of the centuries. When you got 
down from the remnants of the top 
layers you would have descended over 
six thousand feet upon the lower level, 
whose surface has been exposed in huge 
patches over hundreds of square miles 
by the erosion of insatiate streams. 

Even then you would not have reached 
the bottom of the inland sea. For you 
would make your way southward for 
forty miles across a rough desert country, 
on the top of what our learned friends 
call the Carboniferous strata, until you 
came to the brink of the canyon at its 
grandest part and nearly opposite to 



84 ZTbe Great plateau 

the haunts of the tourists. If then you 
should descend the dizzy mile of Car- 
boniferous cliffs and terraces to the level 
of the river, you would at last have 
reached the very bottom of our old inland 
sea, and gone a thousand feet into the 
rugged granite ledge beneath, which 
claims the kinship of age with my paper- 
weight from the Laurentian Hills. This 
granite ledge which formed the earliest 
bottom of the inland sea emerges from 
the under world within a few hundred 
yards of our camp upon the sand bar, 
and it may be seen from many points 
near Grand View, sloping up into the 
sunlight from beneath some layered rem- 
nants of the ancient sediment. 

The secret of the great denudation and 
of this wonderful achievement of the 
Colorado in carving out of rock a series 
of canyons about five hundred miles long, 
and, in one place at least, more than 



MoritertDafeinG 85 



a mile deep, with a multitude of tribu- 
tary chasms and gorges, is very simple 
when you know it. The old lake-bed 
slowly rose. 

At first, the Colorado River and its 
tributaries, or some nameless monstrous 
ancestor of these, sweeping over the 
slowly rising surfaces, planed them down 
in most relentless fashion, and then be- 
gan wearing out broad shallow stream- 
beds. But then the country rose more 
rapidly, and the water had to cut deeper 
channels in the rocks in order to get 
out and away to sea. 

Owing in part to the wear of the water 
itself, but more to the ceaseless bom- 
bardment of the suspended sand which 
it bore from the up country, or picked 
up as it went along, and to the thump 
of pebbles and boulders which it swept 
on in flood-time, the river kept cutting 
down as the strata rose, until finally, 



86 XTbe Great BMateau 

when, what was left of our inland sea- 
bottom got thrust up so that, towering 
far above its erstwhile rocky shores, it 
had to be called a plateau, the Colorado 
River and its auxiliaries found them- 
selves at the bottom of a series of colossal 
canyons and gorges, where they are to-day. 

Then, increasing the complexity of 
things hereabouts, the strata in the rising 
plateau got overstrained, and bent up in 
great swells or ridges, forming subsidiary 
tables or plateaus of great extent. In 
other places the strata broke in cracks, a 
hundred miles in length sometimes. Along 
these cracks the rock layers on one side 
or the other often sank below or were 
pushed above the general level, forming 
those abrupt cliffs or escarpments which 
the wise ones call " faults. " 

So, thrust up hundreds of feet, over 
great areas, by resistless plu tonic forces, 
losing large tracts of its upper strata by 




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earlier floods and streams, gouged out by 
the Colorado and its tributaries, still ex- 
isting or extinct, and withal crumpled 
and cracked and displaced in varied fash- 
ion when the earth's crust writhed, the 
old inland sea-bottom, now our Great 
Plateau, certainly has won through much 
tribulation the right to glory in its 
stupendous relics. 

But, in addition to all the rest, a mul- 
titude of volcanoes and lava streams have 
at one time or another burst up through 
the strata here and there, some of them 
not so very long ago, leaving imposing 
mountains, building cinder cones, and 
deluging the land with molten rock. 

That is my story. Its plot in years is 
long indeed. It exploits the forces which 
build and sculpture worlds. And if it 
lack the human touch which lies at the 
heart of the best stories, one yet may link 
the present to the past if he realise that 



88 Ubc (Breat plateau 

the swift turbid stream beside our camp 
still as sand and silt, is bearing the moun- 
tains to the sea; that the click of pebble 
against pebble where the water rushes 
over shallows, and the beat of rock on 
rock along the deeper bottoms, are slowly- 
wearing stone to sand; that the great 
river is cutting its channel deeper and 
wider year by year, while the shower 
gusts and the frost are yet at work shaping 
this wonderland into those forms of grace 
and majesty which are the heritage of 
millenniums. The great inland sea is 
gone, but the ripples are on its beaches 
still. The strange beasts have vanished, 
but their bones cumber the ground. The 
earth's crust has ceased to heave and 
crack, but the crumpled broken strata 
rise in imposing hills and cliffs. The 
volcanoes are cold and silent, but the great 
cinder cones and lava beds are still sinister. 
When we clamber back up to the sur- 



Worlt>*/IDafein0 



8 9 



face of the earth again in the morning, 
passing the rugged millennial marks as 
we go, we shall not fail to bear some 
uplift of spirit from this little sojourn 
with the world's masterpiece. 




a W* 



CHAPTER VI 

A SUMMER AMONG CLIFF DWELLINGS 

I FANCY that to most people the word 
archaeology conveys suggestions 
largely of old Greece or Rome or 
Egypt, of fluted pillars and damaged 
friezes, or of statues whose heads and 
legs and arms have mostly gone afield — 
of these and sundry things which agents 
of societies and colleges dig up with 
subscription money, and write books about, 
or lecture upon with a lantern in a dark- 
ened room. At least if entirely candid, 
the writer must confess that this was the 
response which his untutored mental ma- 
chinery offered to the chance suggestion 
of the word. 

By this it will be perceived that the 
90 



Cliff 2>wellin0S 91 

writer is, as to archaeology, one sitting 
in the outer darkness, and this is what 
he wishes to be clearly understood. For 
so only would it seem wise to record 
in haphazard fashion some phases of a 
summer's wandering among ruined and 
forgotten homesteads of the great South- 
west, and a layman's conception thus 
derived of a group of prehistoric Americans 
who had finished their strenuous and 
narrow lives, and faded into tradition 
and myth before the Spaniards, zealous 
for God and athirst for gold, had pene- 
trated to the heart of our continent, 
and even before Columbus had ventured 
across the unknown sea. 

The "cliff-builders" lived in such queer 
places, built so well, and seem to have 
vanished so utterly, that by many they 
are regarded as the most mysterious of 
the American aborigines. 

But those who know their World's 



9* tTbe (Sreat plateau 

Fairs or who have read the results of 
Bandelier's toilsome researches, or who 
have turned the pages of the great reports 
of the Bureau of Ethnology, are aware 
that a good deal is known, after all, about 
the haunts and ways of the American "Cliff- 
dwellers," and that some shrewd guesses 
are current about their story. The heart 
of the story seems to be that they were 
sedentary Indians allied to the present 
Pueblos, some of whom were long ago 
driven to places of defence and conceal- 
ment under stress of conflict with no- 
madic tribes, who built no houses, and 
have left no trace in the land across 
which they hunted the unhappy refugees. 

Let us glance a moment at this land. 

I suppose that few know which four of 
the commonwealths of the United States 
come together at one point in right- 
angled corners. The writer cannot truly 
say that these possessors of unusual geo- 



Gltff Dwellings 93 



graphic lore are greatly superior to the 
uninformed majority. But, in fact, Colo- 
rado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico 
do meet at one point, in one of the most 
lonesome and forbidding sections of the 
Great Plateau. And a few venturesome 
persons have travelled a good many hot 
miles to tickle their fancies by sprawling 
their anatomies into the domain of four 
at once of the units of this great republic. 
A glance at a map of the United States 
shows this unique relationship, and at- 
tention is called to it here only because 
this easily located point on the map is 
near the northern limit of a little-known 
and little-traversed district in which relics 
of the prehistoric American are accessible, 
abundant, and well-preserved. 

If one takes a map of the United States 
drawn on such a scale that it is about 
seven inches from New York to San 
Francisco, and puts a silver quarter of 



94 XTbe 0reat flMateau 

a dollar upon it so that the head of the 
alleged bird of freedom, looking toward 
the west, lies just over these four corners, 
he will have covered a tract considerably- 
larger than New England, almost as 
dry as Sahara, and as rich in the relics 
of a vanished race as any classic country 
of them all. 

The eastern border of the silver "quar- 
ter" lies along the slopes of the Great 
Continental Divide covering the sources 
of the Rio Grande. Its western segment 
bridges the awesome depths of the Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado, and edges close 
upon the foothills of the Wasatch range. 
The Santa Fe Railway traverses the lower 
third of the tract. Across its upper 
portion the San Juan River, muddy and 
treacherous, rolls sullenly westward 
through hot reaches of desert, and then 
rushing along deep gorges, merges at 
last into the great Colorado as it sweeps 



Cliff Dwellings 95 

and roars through its vast self-sculptured 
chasm on its way to the Pacific. North- 
ward the great hills are piled confusedly- 
together, guarding their treasure of gold 
and silver and jewels and coal. To the 
south the land stretches brokenly away 
toward Mexico. 

All over this great stretch of country, 
so hot in its untempered summer sun- 
shine that one wishes that he had not come, 
so bewitching in its skies and clouds and 
atmosphere and hills that not for worlds 
would he have staid away, are the ruined 
homes of the forgotten people. 

One finds them at the doors of Navajo 
wickiups deep in the wilderness, where old 
women sit weaving blankets in the sun. 
One finds them hundreds of miles from 
the white man's dwellings or the brown 
man's haunts. Sometimes they are on 
high plateaus, sometimes in broad valleys, 
sometimes hung along the crags of well- 



96 Zbc Great plateau 

nigh inaccessible canyons, or perched, it 
may be, in dizzy security atop of some 
gigantic rock which rises sheer and soli- 
tary above the plain, over which it has 
kept so long unheeded vigil. 

Some of the ruins are only crumbled 
piles of stone, half covered with sand or 
overgrown with grass and bushes and 
trees, which the untutored traveller would 
pass unheeding. Some of them have 
walls, often several storied, still upright 
and firm, or partly fallen in. Some, out 
upon the bare plateaus, are to-day im- 
posing in their mass, with hundreds of 
stone chambers quite intact and accessi- 
ble, or filled with the stone and mortar of 
other walls fallen upon them from story 
after story above. 

Some of the forsaken dwellings are 
mere caves scooped out at the base of 
cliffs. Some are the natural or widened 
"blow-outs" on volcanic hills. Finally 



Cliff Dwellfnaa 97 

along the walls of the canyons, some- 
times near the bottom, but more often far 
up their rugged sides upon shelves or 
caverns in the softer rock, one may 
see, scarcely visible against the grey bare 
surfaces, tiny stone boxes edging sheer 
upon the face of the cliff, or a series of 
these more conspicuous and strung along 
on various levels, with only a bird's or a 
squirrel's way in sight to reach them. 

All these silent witnesses of folks that 
were will not greatly disturb the equa- 
nimity of the traveller, who, after he has 
learned from disappointing scrambles that 
relics are rare on the floors of the aban- 
doned rooms, will from the saddle for a 
little look and wonder, and then pass on. 

But there comes a time to the well ad- 
vised and well-conducted wanderer when 
everything else on earth for a moment 
fades. He has ridden through miles 
it may be, of an aggravating jungle of 



98 XLbc Great plateau 

pinon and juniper, and has passed at last 
into a wilderness so desperate and so pro- 
found that all human habitation seems a 
thing of infinite remoteness. 

Suddenly the horse stops. The smooth 
rock reaches, over which he has been 
making his way, have dropped before 
him, and he is on the brink of a chasm. 
The walls fall sheer at the top some hun- 
dreds of feet, then slope, then fall again 
to a shrub-clad bottom which stretches 
away into blue distance. This at first 
is all, and the grandeur of the scene 
alone commands attention. But slowly 
then out of the grey shadows of the far- 
ther side a picture is evolved, so strange, 
so confusing, so improbable, that one is 
disposed to wonder if the sun has not 
played him false, and the thing before 
him is not some weird delusion. 

It is a great group of ruins perched 
midway in the opposite cliff, many sto- 



Cliff Dwellings 99 

ried, quaintly towered, with doorways 
and narrow windows still intact, or stout 
walls here and there fallen forward into the 
chasm, revealing chamber within cham- 
ber, tier upon tier, all silent, motionless, 
and utterly uncanny here in the heart of 
the wilderness. Here, where none comes 
except by chance a roaming Indian, who 
hurries in superstitious dread away ; where 
naught lives but squirrels, rabbits, vul- 
tures, and coyotes, and some still crawling 
things, and where for hours no sound falls 
upon the hot, slumberous air — 

But I have a little outrun my tale. 

While the cliff dwellings are scattered 
here and there all over the region which 
I have bounded in silver, they are for the 
most part not large, and as single structures 
not very striking. But there is a district 
lying close about the meeting-point of 
Colorado, "Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico 
in which not only the prehistoric ruins 

LOFC 



ioo XTbe 0reat plateau 

of the plateaus and the valleys, but 
also those built in the dizzy recesses 
of the canyon walls, are imposing even to 
grandeur. 

No part of this once widely inhabited 
region is so rich in these great communal 
cliff dwellings as a high plateau, thirty 
miles long and twelve or fifteen wide, 
situated largely in the Ute Indian reser- 
vation in south-western Colorado, and 
called the Mesa Verde. This great tim- 
bered upland, rising in rough, forbidding 
cliffs fifteen hundred or two thousand feet 
above the surrounding country, slopes 
gradually southward toward the San Juan 
River in Arizona. 

The Mancos River, flowing south-west- 
ward to join the San Juan, at some remote 
period, has gouged out of the great rock 
mesa a series of wild canyons. These are 
now mostly dry, and, save by dim, rough 
Indian trails, almost impassable. 




u 



Cliff Dwellings 101 

It is in the walls of these arid canyons so 
desperately aloof even yet, that the "Cliff- 
men " built some of their most elaborate 
and imposing fortress-homes. It was here 
in the hollows and on the plateaus above, 
that for years which no man to-day may 
number, they wrung a meagre subsistence 
from the parched soil, fighting meanwhile, 
as it would seem, for even this scanty 
foothold in the wilderness. And then 
they left it all to the squirrels and vultures 
and coyotes, to the wandering Ute and 
Navajo, to the lizards and the sun. 

Nearly all of the cliff dwellings of the 
Mesa Verde have been vigorously, though 
none of them exhaustively, explored. 

The delver among these ruins is early 
and continually impressed by the won- 
derful preservation of things of the most 
delicate texture; things which in most 
climates would speedily have rotted and 
crumbled, such as fabrics and feathers 



toi Zbc Great plateau 

and corn-husks and the tassels of the 
corn and fragile wood fibres. The cli- 
mate of these regions is so very dry, and 
the remnants of household articles have 
been so absolutely protected from rain 
and snow in the deep recesses of the great 
caverns in the cliffs where the houses are, 
that the usual disintegrating processes 
of time have here been held largely in 
check. 

It would make too long a story were I 
to enter upon a description of these great 
houses in the cliffs, or recount the vicissi- 
tudes of the explorer as he seeks for the 
old pathways along the ledges, or scram- 
bles up the bare rocks, clinging to shallow 
grooves and notches which the old "Cliff- 
men " made so long ago, and which the 
wear of centuries has not yet effaced 
Nor need I emphasise the toilsome nature 
of the explorer's task when he enters 
upon the search in the choking dust heaps 



Cliff Dwellings 103 

which the ages have strewn over all the 
ruins, and under the piles of fallen masonry, 
for the secrets of the burial-places. The 
sun is very powerful, the dust is insuffer- 
ably annoying, the stones which must be 
turned are legion, and what is left of the 
early American himself, when you do 
get at him, is not a pleasing thing to behold, 
and may be hauntingly uncanny. 

For any one who chooses now to gather 
them, the ancient pottery and other uten- 
sils of the "Cliff-" and" Plains-dwellers" 
have considerable value for purposes of 
sale to tourists and collectors. In some 
parts of this region it is the practice of 
the settlers, on Sundays or other holidays, 
to organise picnics to the ruins. And 
the rustic swain is wont to signalise his 
regard for his Dulcinea by digging for her 
out of the desolate graves what articles 
the chances of the hour may bring. She, 
cosily seated amid piles of broken pottery, 



104 Ube ©reat plateau 

darting lizards and dead men's bones, 
smiles complacently the while upon the 
dusty delver from the chaste recesses 
of a sun-umbrella. 

If, now, without further parley as to the 
details of the ruins and the vicissitudes 
of their exploration, we turn to the vari- 
ous things which the old " Cliff-dwellers " 
have left, many of which one may see for 
himself to-day upon the spot, and try to 
frame from them a conception of the 
masters of these homes, we shall find that a 
good deal may be read out of the dark- 
ness of forgotten centuries without special 
light from the torches of the professional 
archaeologists. 

He was a dark-skinned fellow, this old 
" Cliff-dweller," as his mummified remains 
show plainly enough. The hair was usu- 
ally black, and moderately coarse and 
long. He was of medium stature, and 
the back of his skull was flattened by be- 




Sandals of the Cliff- Dweller. 



Cliff 2>wellfn05 105 

ing tied firmly against a board in infancy, 
as among some races is the custom still. 
He had fair teeth, much worn, as the 
years grew upon him, from munching ill- 
ground corn. 

It would be difficult to say from the 
articles thus far discovered just how much 
this prehistoric man was devoted to dress, 
or rather, to undress. A simple breech- 
clout was certainly in vogue, and there 
is considerable reason to think that this 
was, at times at least, the piece de resist- 
ance in his costume. But parts of hide 
jackets, fur caps, blankets made of feathers 
tied on to a coarse net of cord, are also 
in evidence, and mostly preserved among 
the furnishings of the dead. A variety 
of sandals and other rude foot-gear has 
been found, some woven of yucca leaves, 
some braided of other vegetable fibres 
some rudely constructed from corn-husks. 

A certain passion for personal adorn- 



106 Ube ©teat plateau 

ment and devotion to superstition is evi- 
dent from the rough beads and the strings 
of bones and small shells which he wore, 
while amulets of turquoise or shell or 
broken pottery pierced for suspension 
about the neck are not seldom found. 
He brushed his hair with tightly tied 
bunches of stiff grass, with one end 
trimmed square, and his long coarse 
black hairs are clinging still to some of 
them. 

The spirit of the age now prompts us to 
ask what did he do for a living, this dark 
fellow in scanty attire, with a tinge of 
vanity and superstition? 

He was, first of all, a farmer. He 
raised corn and beans and gourds in the 
thin soil of the mesas, or upon the lesser 
slopes, which still show traces of scanty 
terraces. Corn is frequently found, some- 
times still on the cob, sometimes shelled 
off and stowed in jars, while corn-cobs and 



Cliff Dwellings 107 

corn-husks are scattered everywhere among 
the rubbish. The beans and gourds are 
less abundant. The gourd seeds were 
sometimes carefully stowed away. The 
only farming implements which have 
been found are, so far as I am aware, 
stout sticks pointed or flattened at one 
end, quite like the planting-sticks still in 
use by primitive agriculturists. 

It is evident enough that in his time, as 
now, his country was very dry, and water 
had to be carefully husbanded. One finds 
here and there traces of shallow reservoirs 
and what seem to have been irrigating 
ditches. Sloping hollows in the rocks 
near the houses are not infrequently 
dammed across their lower ends, appar- 
ently to save the melting snow or the 
waste of showers. 

The considerable number of large jars 
would indicate that water was sometimes 
stored also in the houses. The earthen 



108 Zbe (5rcat plateau 

ladles or dippers not infrequently found 
in the ruins or in the graves are often 
much worn and bevelled on the edges, 
an indication that they were used to ladle 
up water from hollows in the rocks, such 
as abound on the plateaus above and 
about the cliffs. Small springs still exist 
near some of the largest cliff-houses. 

That the " cliff-man " was skilled in 
masonry the well shaped and finished 
stones, the trim walls hung upon steep 
sloping rock surfaces, sheer at the edges 
of cliffs, where they rest to-day firm and 
secure, abundantly prove. The mortar 
of most of the houses was very cleverly 
laid in, and between the tiers pebbles and 
small stones were set, giving a pleasing 
break to the lines of the masonry. 

The rooms of these great dwellings 
were apparently not all built at one time, 
and in size, shape, and arrangement con- 
form to the exigencies of the situation. 




Skilful Prehistoric Masonry. 



Cliff Dwellings 109 

Some of them are many feet across, some 
so small that one can hardly stand up- 
right in them and can reach from side to 
side. Some communicate with one an- 
other by low openings, through which 
one must crawl on hands and knees; 
others are entered only through holes in 
the ceilings. Some of the rooms are so 
small that they could have been used only 
for storage. 

The great sloping arches of the caverns 
in which the larger cliff-houses are bulit 
shelter most of them from above. But 
when rooms were exposed or were built 
one above another, the roofs or floors are 
supported by timber girders, whose rough 
ends witness to the toilsome processes in- 
volved in their shaping with such tools 
alone as men of the stone age could 
command. Upon the heavier timbers they 
laid smaller sticks, tied osiers and cedar 
bark to these, and plastered the whole 



no XTbe Great plateau 

over with thick layers of mud or mortar. 
A large part of the timber is well preserved. 

Within, the masonry is usually coated 
with a thin layer of plaster, and the sweep 
of the rough palms of the old artisans is 
still plain on many a chamber wall. 
They had tiny fire-places in the corners 
of some of the little rooms. In others 
the fire was in a pit in the floor at the 
centre. The smoke from the fires found 
its way out as best it could through 
holes in the ceilings. So the walls are 
often very black, and from some of them 
you can rub off the soot upon your hands 
to-day. But when the wall got too 
sooty a thin fresh layer of plaster was 
laid on over it. In some of the larger 
rooms one can count sixteen, and perhaps 
more, thin layers of fresh plaster, with 
the soot in streaks of black between them. 

Furniture there is no trace of, unless 
one reckon as such a low stone step or 



Glitz Dwellings m 

bench which runs around some of the 
larger rooms. 

Many of the ruins contain large round 
chambers with the narrow stone bench 
along the wall, and a pit in the centre 
for a fire. They have usually a pyramidal 
or dome-like roof of large timbers, whose 
ends rest upon stone piers which project 
into the rooms. The walls of these rooms, 
which seem to have been places of assem- 
bly and are called estufas or kivas, are 
usually very sooty. In them, too, one 
finds such evidence of an intelligent 
provision for ventilation as shames some 
of our practices to-day. Flues, often of 
considerable size, are built into the walls, 
leading from the open air down into the 
chambers, and opening at the floor-level. 
In front of this opening, and between it 
and the fire-pit, was usually a stone or 
wooden screen. 

Little square cubbies were not infre- 



H2 XTbe <3reat plateau 

quently made inside the rooms by leaving 
a stone out of the masonry. These are 
especially common in the large round 
chambers just mentioned, and small uten- 
sils and ornaments have been frequently 
found stowed away in them. Many of 
the rooms have wooden pegs built into 
the walls, apparently for hanging things 
upon. 

The stout timbers which form the floors 
of the higher rooms were sometimes left 
sticking through the masonry outside the 
walls, and small cross-sticks being tied 
upon them, they made excellent balconies 
— a little dangerous, perhaps, if some 
skulking marauder with a bow and arrows 
should happen to creep to the nearest 
cliff edge above, but airy and with com- 
manding outlook. 

Firesticks have been left, with round 
charred ends, such as the early folks 
the world over were wont to twirl upon 




Arrow-Heads, Spear-Heads, etc., of the Cliff-folk. 



Cliff H)weUfna$ 113 

another stick and so win fire. Little 
bunches of cedar-bark strips closely tied 
with yucca threads, and burnt at one end 
where they have been used as tinder, 
are not uncommon "finds" in the rooms 
and in the rubbish heaps. 

No trace of metal tools or utensils has 
ever been found in these ruins. The 
" Cliff-dweller " was a man of the stone age. 
He was no mean artisan, however, as may 
be seen by his stone arrow-heads and spear- 
heads, by his stone axes and hammers, many 
of them, thanks to the dry climate, with 
the wooden handle still tied firmly on to 
them. He had knives made of chipped 
stone tied into the end of a stick, and 
often made fast with some sort of pitch. 
Sharp, smooth stones, which may have 
been used for skinning large game, are 
noc rare. 

Small stone mortars with spherical or 
cylindrical pestles are not uncommon, 



n4 TTbe 0reat plateau 

and one may safely conjecture that they 
were employed to grind the mineral 
colours used in the decoration of pottery. 
Stone-tipped drills have been found, which 
were doubtless used to make holes in their 
amulets and beads, and in mending broken 
pottery. There are corn-mills — great stone 
slabs, a little hollowed, and set aslant 
in the floor at one side of some of the 
rooms, with a flat narrow slip of stone to 
be grasped in the hands in grinding. 

Our early American was something 
of a hunter, if we may judge from the 
deer bones often found. He was a war- 
rior, too. Many of his houses are not 
only built in inaccessible and well-pro- 
tected places, but loop-holes sloping 
towards the avenues of approach are 
common in the walls, and the doors have 
ample provision for closure by tightly 
fitting slabs of stone. Bows still loosely 
strung with sinew, and stone-tipped arrows 



Cliff Dwellings 115 

with the shaft intact, have defied time, 
too. With these and stone-tipped spears 
and stone knives and wooden clubs our 
warrior did his hunting and his fighting. 

The "cliff -man' * had one domestic animal 
and, so far as can be made out, only one, 
and that was the turkey, or something 
very like it. This bird must have been 
kept in considerable numbers. Its feathers 
are found in abundance, and were used, 
as I have said, to make blankets. Bunches 
of the quills have been discovered stowed 
away in the houses. This domestic pet 
has been pictured more often than any 
other creature by the man of the cliffs, 
and most frequently upon his pottery. 

There is no evidence of the use of written 
characters by these people, but here and 
there simple geometric or irregular figures 
are found in dull colour on the plaster 
and on the faces of the cliffs. There is 
relatively little animal drawing, but 



n6 Zbc (Breat plateau 

occasionally crude linear figures of men, 
mountain sheep and birds are found. 
Similar crude pictographs are occasionally 
cut in rough shallow lines in the rocks 
near the dwellings. On the whole, such 
artistic capacities as this old barbarian 
possessed were but scantily exercised 
upon his walls. 

In his pottery, however, as well as in 
animal figures and various other objects 
made of shell, jade, onyx, and turquoise 
among which are some very handsome 
mosaics, we find such expression of the 
artistic sense as gives him a very respect- 
able standing in the hierarchy of early 
American art. 

While whole pieces of pottery are 
occasionally found in protected places 
in the abandoned rooms, and fragments 
are scattered in profusion everywhere, 
the larger part of the well-preserved 
articles of clay has come from the burial 




Prehistoric Pictographs. 
On the face of the cliffs facing the San Juan River, in Utah. 



Cliff H>wellin0S 117 

places. So I must linger a moment to 
speak of these. 

The rock about the cliff dwellings is 
usually so scantily clad with soil that 
earth burial was not accomplished without 
difficulty. The places outside the dwell- 
ings most commonly selected for this 
purpose were low shelves in the cliffs, 
from which the earth was scooped, and 
shallow pits, sometimes stoned at the 
sides or lined with clay, were thus fash- 
ioned. 

But one of the most common burial- 
places of the " cliff -man " of the Mesa Verde 
was the rubbish heaps which he allowed 
to accumulate, often to an enormous 
extent, in the low, dark, angular space 
at the back of his houses, where the sloping 
roof of the caverns in the clifl met the 
horizontal shelf on which the houses 
stand. 

These great rubbish heaps, often several 



tiS tlbe (Sreat plateau 

feet deep, are made up of dirt and dust 
of unrecognisable origin, of turkey drop- 
pings, and of all sorts of waste from the 
man and his housekeeping. There are 
feathers and corn-husks and corn-cobs, 
fragments of bone and wood, rinds and 
stems of gourds, scraps of yucca, half- 
burned corn-cobs, pieces of charcoal, bits 
of worn fabrics, cast-off sandals, and 
broken pottery in abundance. 

Now and then the delvers in these 
back-door rubbish heaps have come upon 
whole pieces of pottery or stone imple- 
ments and other things which have evi- 
dently been hidden there, perhaps in 
times of siege. The whole material is 
disagreeable on account of the fine choking 
dust which rises whenever it is stirred, but 
it is not otherwise offensive now. 

It was in this dark, protected place, then, 
that the cliff-man often buried his dead. 
The legs and arms were usually drawn 



Cliff Swelling «9 

to the body, which was tied and bound 
with yucca leaves, and protected in vari- 
ous ways from direct contact with the 
earth, sometimes by wooden or osier or 
yucca mats, or by feather cloth or bas- 
ketry, or slabs of stone. Many of the 
skeletons are well preserved, and occa- 
sionally the whole body is mummified 
and in very perfect state. Some bodies 
have been found walled up in the smaller 
rooms. 

But it is of the pottery that I wish es- 
pecially to speak. It is all fashioned by 
the hands, for no tidings of the potter's 
wheel had ever reached these folks, and 
their skill in the management of clay 
justly commands admiration. Some of 
the great jars holding several gallons are 
scarcely one-eighth of an inch thick, are 
of excellent shape and symmetry, and, 
when struck, ring like a bell. The old 
cliff-man — or woman — knew how to mix 



no Ube (Breat plateau 

pounded stone, or sand, or old pottery 
broken into small fragments with his clay 
to prevent shrinkage and cracking. He 
knew how to bake his finished articles, 
and his fancy in shaping and decorating 
was of no mean order. 

Some of the ware is grey and smooth 
and undecorated; some forms show that 
it was built up by strips of clay, coil upon 
coil. In many pieces regular indentations 
made by the finger tips or nail upon the 
coils give the general impression of basket- 
work. The tiny ridges of the maker's 
finger-tips are often marked upon this 
indented coilware with a sharpness which 
rivals any of the impressions which one 
can get to-day on paper, with all the 
refinement of Galton's fascinating but 
smeary technique. Then there is a third 
kind of pottery, in which the article has 
received a surface wash of light mineral 
colour, upon which are decorations of 







*1 



b ° s 

S St 

O £ ^ 

■£ ° 

- M o 



Cliff Dwellings 121 

various forms, usually in black, but some- 
times in black and red. It is not very 
common to find red pottery in the region 
about the Mesa Verde, but occasionally 
a piece is unearthed. 

The forms of pottery are various. 
There are bowls of many shapes and 
sizes, usually decorated on the inside 
only. There are long jars and short jars, 
some with wide and some with narrow 
mouths. There are vases, pitchers, cups, 
ladles, platters, sieves, mugs, and bottles, 
and many other queer-shaped things which 
it would be difficult to name. The colours 
were mineral, and very durable, as is 
evident from their excellent preservation 
after hundreds of years of burial. 

The decoration is frequently almost 
concealed, when the articles are exhumed, 
by a rough whitish incrustation of lime 
which through the years of burial has 
gathered on the surfaces. Washing with 



122 XTbe (5reat plateau 

dilute acid discloses the pattern under- 
neath. 

Not infrequently one finds bowls and 
jars which have been cracked or broken, 
and mended by drilling holes along the 
cracks and tying the pieces together with 
yucca cords. A great deal of care was 
evidently taken in fashioning and deco- 
rating some of this pottery, and the 
thrifty old " Cliff-dweller " knew very well 
that a mended jar was useful to store corn 
and flour and such dry things in, even if it 
would no longer hold water. 

One often finds, inside the pieces of pot- 
tery in the graves, fragments of the min- 
eral from which the pigment is ground, 
and smooth stones with which, apparently, 
the surface of the clay articles was 
smoothed and polished. Arrow-heads, 
bone implements, beads, shells, amulets, 
corn, and a variety of their pathetic be- 
longings are not infrequently found packed 



Cliff 2>wellfn08 123 

within the jars and bowls beside the 
crumbled bodies. 

And the " Cliff-dweller " smoked a pipe! 
I feel constrained to leave it to the ar- 
chaeologists to decide whether he smoked 
for the fun of it, or with devotional or 
ceremonial intent, and what he smoked. 
But one short-stemmed pipe of clay, dec- 
orated in red, and blackened within from 
use, and one half shaped in process of 
construction, are in my own collection. 
It is a dreamy land, this which he lived 
in, and I hope that he lay in the shadows 
sometimes in the lulls of his strenuous 
life, and, with no urgent thought of his 
gods or his etiquette, puffed idly and at 
ease his little dudheen. 

Baskets and mats showing consider- 
able variety in the weaving and a 
distinct appreciation of ornament witness 
to the cliff-man's skill. Coarse grass, 
yucca, willow, and split sticks are the 



i24 XTbe Great plateau 

materials which he used for this pur- 
pose. 

The bottoms of most of the jars and 
larger clay vessels are rounded, and, so 
far as I have seen, never have the hollow 
underneath which in modern Indian pot- 
tery facilitates its carrying poised upon 
the head. And so plaited rings, which 
were doubtless used for steadying the jars 
upon the head or on the ground, are, as 
might be expected, not uncommon. 

But his skill as a weaver was not lim- 
ited to basketry, for fabrics of varied 
texture and composition are largely in 
evidence. The yucca, or Spanish-bayonet, 
which grows all over the arid country of 
the "Cliff -dweller," was one of the things 
which he had to thank his gods for, hour 
by hour. 

He hung the narrow leaves about his 
houses in neatly tied dried bunches, ready 
for coarser purposes. He used them in this 



GUft Dwellings 125 

form as cords to tie slender sticks in place 
upon his ceilings, on which the mud was 
plastered ; with them he bound his sandals 
to his feet, pieced out bands of cloth which 
were too worn or weak to steady burdens 
carried on his back; with them he tied 
together the sticks which framed the 
baby board and bound the dead for burial. 
With them he mended broken bowls, and 
wove coarse nets around the great water 
jars for support or suspension; while, 
woven close, they made durable sandal 
soles and coarse baskets. 

Then he beat out the brittle woody 
part of these precious yucca leaves, with 
wooden sticks, and out of the fine, tough, 
pliable fibrils which were left he twisted 
threads and cords, the warp and woof of 
his most common woven fabrics. Some 
of these fabrics are coarse and rough; 
some are smooth and fine. In some of 
them the yucca cord forms the warp, 



126 Zbc (3reat plateau 

while the woof is of cotton, dark and light, 
with woven pattern. 

Whether he used the narrow strips of 
the leaf, or cords or rope twisted of their 
fibres, the old cliff fellow knew how to tie 
good square knots which have not slipped 
a jot for some hundreds of years. I have 
sought in vain for "squaw" knots, among 
thousands of these bits of handiwork, on 
roof and ceiling and mended fabric. And 
he who never saw the sea could make a 
"ring splice" to shame a sailor. 

The feather cloth is, in some re- 
spects, one of the most noteworthy of 
this old citizen's productions. He hetch- 
elled his dry yucca leaves, twisted their 
fibrils into coarse cords, tied these to- 
gether to form a wide-meshed net, and 
then inch by inch he bound them close 
with little tufts of fluffy blue-grey feathers, 
ravaged, no doubt, largely from his turkey 
pets ; or sometimes he twisted the feathers 



Cliff Dwellings 127 

into the cords as he made them. Some 
of the feather blankets so toilsomely con- 
structed have been found in excellent 
preservation, but in most of them the 
feathers are largely frayed away. They 
must have been very warm, and were 
apparently among the choicest posses- 
sions of these thrifty folks. A little fine- 
textured cloth all of cotton has been 
found. 

The utensils of some of his milder in- 
dustries the cliff-man largely fashioned 
out of bone. He ground broad bevelled 
edges on the broken segments of the leg 
bones of larger animals, like the deer, 
forming crude knives and chisels and 
scrapers; but of smaller bones, and espe- 
cially of the long bones of the turkey, 
he made awls and punches and needles. 
About the surface of the rocks, near the 
cliff dwellings, are shallow hollows and 
grooves, worn, no doubt, by the old artisan 



i 2 8 TOe Great plateau 

in shaping and polishing his stone and 
bone implements. 

I was greatly puzzled, during our delv- 
ings among the rubbish heaps behind the 
ruins, by numerous small irregular wads 
of fine strips of corn-husk or other fibre, 
which had been bruised and closely mat- 
ted together; and it was not until I had 
later become acquainted with the Hopi 
Indians, two hundred and fifty miles to 
the southward of the Mesa Verde, that 
I found a clew. Here I saw them pick 
out of a bowl of thick brown stuff, which 
they said was sweet, and which cer- 
tainly was sticky, similar looking wads 
of fibre, and, thrusting them into their 
mouths , begin vigorous mastication. Then 
I realised that the husk wads of the rubbish 
heaps had probably been, while in their 
pristine state, the prehistoric avatars of 
the chewing-gum. 

A dark-skinned, black-haired, scantily 




Relics of a Primitive Culture. 
At the top are two Hunting Fetishes and a Prayer-stick of the modern 
Pueblo Indians. Below are objects from the graves of the Cliff-Dwellers : 
Amulets, Pipes, Implements of Bone, and a Stone " Scraper." 



Cliff Dwellings 129 

clad barbarian, then, it seems he was, our 
dweller in the cliffs, the real American. 
Farmer, mason, potter, weaver, basket- 
maker, tailor, jeweller, hunter, priest, 
and warrior all in one. Daring and hardy 
he was to scale those cliffs, and build upon 
their brinks the houses into which he 
gathered sustenance wrung from the un- 
willing soil. Diligent and thrifty he was 
certainly. Skilful, too, as skill goes in 
the stage of evolvement up to which he 
had slowly won his way. Superstitious, 
doubtless, as is ever the case with those 
who frame their notions of the world face 
to face with the crude forces of nature. 
Dreamy, I fancy he must have been, for 
he looked abroad through red dawns and 
hazy noontides and witching twilights 
fading very slowly into night. 

And he was — well — he was undoubt- 
edly dirty. Life has more urgent uses for 
water than bathing in these grim arid 



130 Ubc <&reat plateau 

wastes. But nature is a very efficient 
sanitarian in dry climates such as his, and 
"use can make sweet the peach's shady 
side." So let us say no more about it. 

It is the business of the archaeologist 
to learn and tell you, or to guess and tell 
you, when these early Americans lived, 
where they came from, and whither they 
have gone. A group of skeletons, with 
skulls broken as if by blows, which the 
early explorers found lying unburied in a 
heap upon the floor, would seem to indicate 
that in one case at least there was a fierce 
dramatic ending to the story. The archaic 
character of the pottery and the size of 
some trees which have grown upon the 
ruined masonry prove that several cen- 
turies at least have passed since their 
abandoned homes fell into the custody of 
the squirrels and the elements. The mod- 
ern Indian shuns them, as a rule, as he 
does all things which savour of death ; and 



Cliff Dwellings 131 

so, until a dozen years or so ago, the silent 
dwellings held unchallenged the secrets of 
the vanished race. 

But if the fortunes of the reader should 
lead him, as was the writer's hap, to cross 
on Indian trails the dreary plains and 
barren ridges which, stretching south- 
westward from the Mesa Verde into 
Arizona, through the country of the 
Navajos, bring one at last to the Hopi 
pueblos perched upon towering rock islets 
in the desert, where, since the Spaniards 
found them more than three centuries 
ago, they have lived alone and almost 
untouched by the tides of civilisation 
which have faltered and stopped a 
hundred miles away If he should for 
a time dwell there among the simple, 
kindly people who will bid him welcome 
to their homes, he will come to realise, I 
think, that these are at least the Cliff- 
dwellers "kind of folks,'' though some 



132 Zbc Oreat plateau 

stages beyond them in ways which look 
toward civilisation. 

These Pueblo Indians have half emerged 
from their age of stone more by borrow- 
ing than by evolution. They weave crude 
fabrics in their homes. They make rude 
pottery without a wheel, and with more 
colour in its decoration than the cliff-men 
knew. They brush their hair with bunches 
of stiff fibre, which the cliff folk would 
surely claim to be their own. Their corn- 
mills and mortars are the same. 

In the tiny Hopi houses built of stone 
our cliff-man would find his own little 
chambers with stone benches, the door in 
the ceiling, and plastered still afresh when 
soot grows thick upon the walls . He would 
find blankets made as he made his, only 
instead of feathers, it is fur of rabbits tied 
or twisted on to cords. He would see, 
could he but wander here, the large as- 
sembly chambers, mostly sunken in the 



Cliff Dwellings 133 

rock, with smoky fire in a pit in the mid- 
dle, and an air-hole in the wall where his 
own more purposeful fresh-air flue was 
wont to be. Peering into these chambers 
he would see the men now making or 
mending garments, now gathered in seri- 
ous council, now absorbed in weird cere- 
monial, or through long hours rehearsing 
stories in which the gods walk and talk 
in very chummy fashion with their brown 
brothers. 

He would find the new fellow tilling 
just such meagre fields as he did before 
his work-days were ended. And if he 
missed a certain stuffy snugness and 
palpable security which his cliff eyry 
lent, he would realise that the Hopi man 
has still chosen a brave vantage-ground 
atop of his great frowning mesas, which 
only gunpowder has made ridiculous as 
natural forts. 

So we find at last that our wanderings in 



i34 tTbe (Breat plateau 

the open along paths which lead through 
no academic shades, and which are 
lighted but faintly by the torches of 
science, have landed us safely under the 
wings of the modern archaeologists. 

And now, if still one linger on among 
the Hopi — the "peaceful folks," they 
call themselves — and can enter a little 
into the spirit of their homely lives, he 
will surely realise that while the material 
things which the old " Cliff-dweller " left 
may furnish clews to some definite con- 
ceptions of the outside man, there must 
yet have been something spiritually dom- 
inant in the silent race to which here 
among these simple living folks there is a 
key. The visitor will soon learn that into 
each act of life, each thought, and all tradi- 
tion is woven the sense of intimate rela- 
tionship with potent Beings in earth and 
sky, who guard and shape the brown 
man's destinies. 



Glfff Swellings 13$ 

So one can be certain that the old 
fellows on the cliffs read strange stories 
in the lambent stars, heard angry voices 
in the thunder, caught whispers on the 
breeze, and took all that life brought them 
of good or ill as the meed of gods potent, 
familiar, and ever close at hand. One 
can be certain, too, that when in the old 
days the stars peeped into the smoky little 
dungeons perched along the cliffs, they 
saw intent dusky circles listening hour 
after hour to strange stories of the Pre- 
sences which rule the world, and to 
quaint, endless myths which the old men 
passed on, a sacred legacy, age after 
age. 

And when one turns homeward, un- 
willing as a school-boy bidden to his 
tasks, his impressions of the cliff -man 
and his deserted homes come back to him 
linked with such pictures of sky and air and 
sculptured hill that they all gather at last 



136 



XTbe ©reat plateau 



into a memory so gracious and so in- 
spiring as almost to seem woven in the 
texture of dreams. 




CHAPTER VII 

PRIMITIVE AMERICAN HOUSE BUILDERS 

WE have seen in the last chapter 
that it is possible to construct 
out of the relics which have 
been preserved in the graves and in the 
deep recesses of the great cliff houses, a 
fair conception of the cliff-man, his busi- 
ness and his arts. It may be interesting 
now to look a little more closely and in more 
sedate and systematic fashion at the 
houses which this dusky savage built, 
especially in the open, and to see where 
they are in the land of the Great Plateau. 
In a survey of the widely scattered ruins 
of the south-western United States which 
mark a prehistoric occupancy of regions 

now arid and mostly deserted, it is both 
137 



138 Ubc Great plateau 

convenient and instructive to recognise 
large natural districts corresponding to 
the great drainage areas. Such dis- 
tricts are the watersheds of the Gila 
and its tributaries, of the Little Colo- 
rado, of the Rio Grande, and of the Rio 
San Juan. These are indicated on the 
map. 

A few ruins are scattered along the 
Kanab and the Virgen rivers, which enter 
the Colorado from the west, and a few 
along the borders of the great Colorado and 
its mighty Canyon. Many of the most 
primitive and apparently oldest types 
of ruins are found in the San Juan water- 
shed, especially north of the river in 
south-eastern Utah and the adjacent corner 
of Colorado. In the Rio Grande groups and 
in the valleys of the Little Colorado and the 
Gila and their tributaries, the older ruins 
are scattered among those of a later 
period, some of the latter being prehistoric, 



fcrfmitfte Ibouse JSuil&ers 139 

others historic, with traces of the Spaniards 
here and there. 

The ruins of the Upper Gila and Salt 
River in Arizona have not been carefully 
explored, nor have those which dot the 
country reaching into Mexico. 

The ruins in each of these districts 
are marked by peculiarities of construction 
and grouping, by apparent differences in 
age, and by types of pottery, fabrics, and 
utensils, all of which appear to be of con- 
siderable significance in the attempt to 
characterise these early American Indians 
and to trace the lines of their relationship 
to one another and to existing tribes. 
When each of these districts shall have 
been carefully studied and compared 
and not until then, will the data be at 
hand for wide generalisations regarding 
the origin, relationships, and period of 
occupancy of these house-building people. 

The early explorers of the South-west 



ho Zbc (Breat plateau 

country were much more impressed with 
the ruins which they found perched upon 
the ledges of the cliffs than with the 
stone heaps and fragments of standing 
walls in the open country. The cliff 
houses appealed then as now more strongly 
to the imagination, and as is natural 
from their more sheltered position, they 
are usually in better preservation. The 
early conception of them as defensive 
homes and fortresses and as the scenes of 
savage warfare, lent also a touch of the 
dramatic to the unknown story of these 
house-makers. 

But after all the open ruins are far 
more numerous than are the cliff houses, 
not only on the Great Plateau but on its 
eastern and western borders and in the 
land which stretches away into Mexico. 
Open ruins are almost always to be found 
at no great distance from the cliff houses 
and as the relics from both have been 




c 
o 

O 



primitive Douse Builders 141 



gathered for comparative study it has be- 
come clear that the " Cliff-dweller " did not 
always dwell on the cliffs, that his houses 
on the ledges were not usually forts, and 
that in many instances at least he built 
under the overhanging rocks or in the 
depths of the caverns simply because in such 
places he found a house half made already. 

While, therefore, it is sometimes con- 
venient to speak of " valley dwellings,' ' 
"mesa dwellings," "cliff dwellings," and 
"cave dwellings," there appears to be no 
reason for believing that these distinctions 
are of deeper significance than marks of an 
adaptation to their environment of a 
house-building people lingering in the higher 
stages of savagery. Thus the prehistoric 
house-building Indian of the south-west 
dwelt on the cliff or on the plains as was 
most expedient, but we choose to name 
him the " Cliff-dweller " after his most 
picturesque election, 



142 XTbe Creat plateau 

In the northern part of the great ruin 
area the building material was largely- 
stone, either trimmed stone or boulders, 
depending upon the most available source. 
These were laid in adobe mortar. In 
the southern districts many of the build- 
ings were made largely or wholly of 
adobe. 

There is no reason for believing that 
the number of ruins in any district affords 
an exact indication of the populousness. 
of the region at any one time, because the 
present condition of the ruins seems to 
point to very great differences in age. 
Thus, some of the houses, even though 
standing in exposed situations on the 
storm-swept summits of the mesas, show 
still the weathered roof and floor timbers 
either in place or fallen in upon the shat- 
tered walls; while, on the other hand, 
many of the ruins near by are reduced to 
formless heaps, and are covered deep with 



©rfmitfve UDouse rfBuflfcers 143 

the wear and weather of the stones and 
by the drift of the sand-laden winds. 

Furthermore, excavations which have 
been made in several places show that 
buildings, themselves of great age, have 
been made on the top of still older struc- 
tures. Finally, distinctly different struc- 
tural types of buildings may be found in 
associated groups, which points to a long 
or an interrupted occupancy of the site. 

The attempt to establish typical archi- 
tectural forms in the buildings of these 
ancient people is beset with practical 
difficulties, owing to the frequent special 
adaptation in material and in form to 
particular situations as well as to the 
skilful incorporation of natural objects, 
such as caves, benches, cliffs, and fallen 
rocks, into the structure of the buildings. 

One may, however, conveniently place 
in a class together those ruins which stand 
in the open, either in the valley bottoms 



144 XTbe Great plateau 

or upon the mesas. These open ruins fall 
naturally into four groups: First, small 
isolated or clustered houses or pueblos, 
each conforming to a distinct primitive 
type; second, irregular and often rambling 
groups or clusters of houses, usually 
adapted in form and position to peculiar- 
ities of their situation, such as the heads 
of gulches, the brinks or slopes of canyons, 
the tops of rocks or buttes, etc.; third, 
towers and other isolated structures usu- 
ally standing alone and frequently com- 
manding wide outlooks; fourth, large 
communal pueblos forming compact, many 
roomed buildings. 

On the other hand, it is convenient to 
bring together in a second class those 
ruins which are more or less protected by 
their situation in shallow natural recesses 
or caves or upon overhung benches on 
the faces of the cliffs. Such ruins may 
stand singly or in small clusters or may 



primitive toouse :Buii&ers 145 

be massed to form communal dwellings 
of considerable size. The houses of this 
group are commonly called "cliff dwell- 
ings. " 

The so called "cave dwellings" are 
artificial caves dug out of soft rock. The 
caves often formed only a part of 
the dwelling, being frequently in com- 
munication, through narrow doorways, 
with stone structures built against the 
faces of the soft cliffs in which the caves 
were dug. 

Let us now look at some of these types 
of ruins a little more in detail. 

The writer has spent the summers of 
several years in wandering with a pack 
train over the wide realm of the Great 
Plateau and the adjacent regions where 
the ruins are most abundant, locating the 
various groups which had not been pre- 
viously described and comparing the var- 
ious types of building and forms of burial. 



146 XTbe Great plateau 

Early in his studies the impression was 
gained that the most typical forms of 
buildings were to be sought in such situa- 
tions as offered no incumbrances and no 
adventitious structural adjuncts — such 
situations, in short, as are found in the 
open level bottoms or on the approx- 
imately level mesa tops. 

It was found, in fact, that among the 
smaller ruins which stand in the open, 
either in the valleys or on the mesas, 
there is one type which is by far the most 
abundant and widely distributed, especi- 
ally north of the San Juan River. These 
ruins are usually fallen and are often more 
or less overgrown with sage-brush or 
other low shrubs, so that unless the walls 
are partly standing they form irregular 
and often inconspicuous stone heaps. 
They are, however, almost invariably 
composed of three elements — a series of 
chambers forming the house, an estufa 



prlmtttve Ibouse 3BtttR>ers 147 

or kiva or assembly chamber, and a 
burial mound. Such ruins in the San 
Juan district constitute at least nine- 
tenths of all these smaller isolated struc- 
tures. 

The house in this type of ruin in its 
simplest form consists of a single row of 
rooms, each usually five or six feet wide 
and from eight to ten feet long, with a 
straight wall upon the back, and a short 
right-angled wing at each end : the whole 
forming approximately one side of a 
square. This usually opens southward, 
with an estufa occupying the partially 
enclosed court. The ground-plan of this 
type of ruin is shown in the accompanying 
diagrammatic sketch. Houses of this type 
may have only three or four rooms along 
the back, with single rooms in the wings. 
Or there may be eight or ten rooms at the 
back with two or three in each wing. 
Frequently when there are several rooms 



148 



XTbe Great plateau 



along the back there are two or more 
estufas in the court. 




Ground- plan of Primitive House Type. 

The house in the most typical of these 
ruins is usually carefully constructed. 
The outer walls are from ten to fourteen 



primitive *ouse Buffers 149 

inches thick, often laid up with two rows 
of stones dressed on the outer and inner 
faces, the space between being filled with 
rubble and adobe mortar. The partitions 
between the rooms are usually somewhat 
thinner than the outer walls and often 
consist of a single row of stones. Small 
doorways frequently lead from room to 
room. I have never seen openings in 
the back or sides, nor have I been able 
to determine the existence of doorways 
opening toward the estufa. The entrance 
was doubtless from the roof which was 
reached by ladders. The roof timbers, 
if such there were, have wholly disappeared 
from these typical ruins. 

In many cases, though the walls are 
largely fallen, the outlines of the buildings 
and rooms are readily made out, or are 
developed by throwing off a few of the 
outer fallen stones. In many instances, 
however, drifting sands have largely cov- 



is© the (Breat flMateatt 

ered the ruins, or sage-brush and pinons 
have grown upon them, so that these and 
soil conceal most of the structural outlines. 

The estufa is uniformly circular and is 
situated within or in front of the court 
formed by the wings of the house and 
which looks southward. It is usually 
sunk below the level of the ground surface 
and largely filled with earth and fallen 
stones from its walls, which I have never 
found rising above the general level when 
the ruins are built upon earth. The 
estufas are then shallow circular pits, 
deepest at the centre, and after rains 
may for a time contain water. Thus it 
is that they are commonly called reservoirs 
by the cattlemen and the Navajo. I 
have never excavated one of the estufas, 
so that I know nothing about their depth 
or internal structure. 

The burial mounds which are almost 
invariably associated with such ruins 




i 

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C 

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ftrfmittve Ibouse SSuf l&ers is t 

are, when the surface permits, uniformly 
south or southward of the house, sometimes 
close by, sometimes a few feet or yards 
away. They are sometimes very large, 
occupying much more ground space than 
the ruin itself. When not washed out 
they usually, though not always, rise a 
little above the general surface of the 
ground, are of irregular shape, and are 
more or less abundantly strewn with 
fragments of broken pottery. The soil 
on and about the burial mounds is com- 
monly somewhat darker than the sur- 
rounding earth, and briars, sage-brush, and 
other shrubs are apt to nourish upon them. 

In earlier days the seeker for hidden 
treasure or for merchantable relics was 
wont to pull down the walls of the ruins 
and to delve beneath the rooms. But 
since the significance and constancy of 
the burial mounds have become generally 
known, the fury of the pot-hunter has 



152 tlbe Great Plateau 

been largely diverted to them. It is 
from these burial mounds of the open 
valley and mesa ruins that a large part 
of the pottery is derived which is con- 
stantly poured into the bric-a-brac and 
curio market through ranchmen, traders, 
and professional vandals. 

These burial mounds were apparently 
rubbish heaps, and charcoal, ashes, bits of 
bone, etc., reveal their character. The 
bodies are buried at various depths, from 
a few inches to three or four feet. Some- 
times a slab of stone lies over the body, 
sometimes not. Usually in these open 
burial mounds nothing but the skeleton 
or weathered fragments of bone are left, 
together with one or sometimes several 
pieces of pottery buried with the dead. 
Perishable stuff, — grain, meal, fabrics, etc. 
— such as is often found intact in the pro- 
tected cliff house burials, is rarely recog- 
nisable. But household utensils of various 



primitive Ibouse Builders 153 

kinds are common. The pottery is fre- 
quently intact and close to the shoulders 
or skull. But it is often broken and not 
infrequently has moved in the earth 
several feet from the bones, during the 
long years of burial, doubtless from the 
action of frost. 

While ruins of this primitive type are 
most abundant in the San Juan watershed, 
they are scattered also through the valley 
of the Little Colorado and along the 
tributaries of the Virgen. 

It is interesting to note the frequency 
with which in these primitive abodes 
each house, be it larger or smaller, has its 
separate burial mound. Sometimes there 
are scores of houses scattered over an 
area of less than a square mile, but unless 
these houses are definitely massed to form 
a single building, each with few exceptions, 
has its own combined rubbish heap and 
mausoleum. 



154 ITbe Great plateau 

The significance of this convenient 
arrangement must be sought in the lore 
of the Pueblo Indians of to-day in whom 
the ties of family and clan are of great 
importance in shaping their performances 
and traditions. 

I am disposed to attach considerable 
significance to this type of small dwelling, 
with its uniform association of house, 
estufa, and burial mound, as the simplest 
expression of an early and primitive 
phase of the house-building culture. The 
character of these small ruins as types of 
residence was overlooked in the earlier 
studies in this field, and the significance 
of the burial mound was not recognised. 
When receiving special mention the latter 
was looked upon simply as a rubbish heap, 
strewn with broken pottery. 

Variants of this type of ruin are common. 
Thus, there may be a double row of 
rooms at the back with a single or double 



primitive tbouae Buitoers 155 

row in the wings. In such double rows 
the back row may have two stories. Or, 
these structural units with either single or 
double rows of rooms may be placed end 
to end, thus often forming buildings of 
considerable length. 

Sometimes the wings are prolonged, 
having several rooms enclosing a square 
or elongated court which contains the 
es tufas. In various ways these structural 
units are frequently placed together form- 
ing large buildings with irregular passage- 
ways here and there between them. In 
such cases it is not infrequently evident 
from different degrees of preservation and 
from differences in the character of the 
masonry that the buildings were made at 
successive periods. 

The next best defined type of ruins of 
this class which stand in the open are 
those which are built around the heads 
of rock gulches or canyons. The shallow 



156 TTbe (Breat plateau 

water-courses, often inconspicuous upon 
the tops of the larger plateaus, are apt to 
break suddenly into rocky gulches. 

The ruins which are built around the 
heads of such gulches are especially nu- 
merous in the country north of the San 
Juan River. They are always irregular 
in form, often composed of a series of 
isolated chambers or groups of these 
around the brink of the gulch, and not 
infrequently extending down the rocky 
slopes or ledges toward the bottom. The 
direct line of the stream is usually left 
clear. Not infrequently a rude stone dam 
is still to be seen across the shallow sag in 
the rocks above the ruins. 

Occasionally there is a shallow cave 
beneath an overhanging ledge at the head 
of the gulch in which is a spring or a 
water-pocket. In several ruins of con- 
siderable size built around the cliff edges 
at the head of a gulch, a rock wall about 




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primitive Ifoouse Itailfcers 157 

three or four feet high, often forming a 
zigzag, stands a few feet outside the line 
of the ruins, partially or completely fenc- 
ing them in. This is apparently a defen- 
sive structure. 

Towers of various shapes and heights 
occasionally form a part of composite ruins 
of various types. Isolated towers and 
small single-room structures, often com- 
manding wide outlooks, are occasion- 
ally found. Small single buildings ; large 
and small low-walled stone enclosures; 
square or oblong box-like structures from 
one to two feet across made of thin stone 
slabs, often apparently empty or some- 
times containing a little charcoal, are not 
uncommon. Here and there are rows 
and clusters of thick slabs of stone set 
upon end without other apparent associated 
structures. 

The largest of the open ruins are in the 
form of great pueblos or communal dwell- 



158 Ubc Great IMateau 

ings formed of a congeries of rooms some- 
times several hundred in number, often 
several stories high, with either one or 
more courts which usually open southward. 
These stand in the open, either in the 
valleys or on the tops of the mesas, and 
resemble in many ways the great inhabited 
pueblos like that of Acoma and those of 
the Hopi group. Such are the ruins in 
the upper Chaco Valley, the great ruin 
near the modern village of Aztec in New 
Mexico, and the so-called "Aztec Spring 
Ruin" at the foot of the Sierra El Late 
in Montezuma Valley in south-western 
Colorado, and many others in the valley 
of the Little Colorado and its tributaries. 
Some of the latter are prehistoric, some 
historic. 

Near some of the large pueblos burial 
mounds of considerable size have been 
found. In other instances, however, nota- 
bly in the Chaco group, the situation of 



primitive Ibouse ffiuilfcers 159 

the mass of the burials is still unknown. 

Let us now turn briefly to the ruins in 
protected situations in cliffs and first 
to the cliff dwellings. These ruins built 
in the shallow recesses weathered out of 
the sand rock in the sides of the canyon 
walls, as well as those which stand upon 
narrow ledges overhung and in part pro- 
tected by the cliffs above, vary in form, 
size, and material with the differences in 
site. 

There are countless intermediate forms 
between the long, high shelves upon 
whose brinks shallow stone cabins stand 
alone or in single rows to the shallow 
recesses at the level of the valley bottom, 
in which time and flood and wind drift 
have dealt less kindly with the old habi- 
tations than with those upon the higher 
levels. There is almost endless varia- 
tion from the great caverns of the Mesa 
Verde with their large and still imposing 



160 Ube Great plateau 

buildings or great masses of fallen walls 
to the tiny recesses with scarce foothold 
for a pair of rooms. 

The belief was developed early in the 
study of these ruins, and has since been 
widely entertained, that the builders of 
houses in natural or artificial recesses or 
caves in the cliffs represented an earlier 
and a different phase of culture from that 
which inspired the buildings, large and 
small, which stand in the open and which 
are necessarily of a somewhat different 
structural type. But this notion is not 
justified by the accumulating evidence of 
the essential identity of the house-builders' 
culture, variation in type of structure being 
clearly accounted for by differences in 
local environment and by such conditions 
of change as might readily occur within 
a very limited ethnical period. 

It was obviously important in the choice 
of a building site in a cliff recess that the 



H>rtmitiv>e 'toorxsc JButlbers 161 

slope of the bottom should not be so 
great as to render insecure the foun- 
dations of the buildings, though in many- 
instances this difficulty has been most 
skilfully overcome. The overhang of the 
cliff must be such that the water, running 
in torrents as it often does from the bare 
rock surfaces above, should fall clear of 
the building site. The roof of the recess 
must be solid and not, as is often the 
case, weathering off in huge blocks or in 
shaly flakes. 

The accessibility of the site seems not 
to have so much concerned the builders, 
for though in most instances there are 
simple and natural modes of access even 
to those cliff ruins which it appears at 
first impossible to reach, in the last resort 
they frequently pecked into the rock 
those foot and hand holes up the steepest 
slopes which are still not wholly obliter- 
ated and are still useful. Finally, it 



i6 2 Ube Great plateau 

appears to have been almost indispensable 
that the chosen site should have a south- 
ward or at least a sunny exposure. 

When all these factors are considered, 
I think it is safe to say that it will be 
evident to one who travels widely in the 
ruin district, searching critically the cliffs 
and the walls of the canyons and gorges, 
that a large proportion of the natural 
recesses which are accessible and are 
suitable in depth, in the slope of the bottom 
in the character of the overhanging walls, 
and in exposure, are now, or give evi- 
dence of having been at some time, occu- 
pied by buildings. The form, number, and 
distribution of the cliff houses, then, in any 
region is strictly dependent on its natural 
features. 

When, therefore, in certain localities 
cliff houses preponderate, while in others 
ruins of other types prevail, justifiable 
inference does not point toward different 



primitive Ibouse Buffers 163 

stages of culture or periods of occupancy 
or stress of circumstance. It simply in- 
dicates that in one case the weathering 
of the cliffs has led to the formation of 
recesses adapted for building sites, while 
in the others suitable sites have not been 
formed — either because the dip of the 
strata, the character of the rock, the 
nature and rapidity of erosion, etc., have 
not favoured the formation of rock shelters 
in the cliffs ; or, because no cliffs exist. 

These people were first of all farmers, 
and while they may have been, and 
doubtless were, at times forced to main- 
tain defensive homes, they were clever and 
sensible folks, who were not averse to a 
house half built by erosion in some shel- 
tered nook in the canyons. But it was 
after all the arable land and the rustic 
tradition which largely shaped their cus- 
toms and destinies. 

The so-called " Cave-dwellers " were the 



i6 4 XTbe Great plateau 

same folk as those who built upon the 
ledges of the cliffs and in the open coun- 
try. Only it happens that in a few places 
in the land which these house-building 
people called their own, there were some 
soft ledges near streams and arable valleys 
in which it was easy to scoop out a series 
of chambers with their utensils of harder 
stone. Neither in time nor culture did 
the cave-man differ from the cliff-man, 
or the valley-man. It was his good for- 
tune to be able to make a comfortable 
dwelling with a little less skill and toil 
than could his brothers whose lot had 
fallen on different geological bottoms. 

The most typical and noteworthy ex- 
amples of cave dwellings or cavate lodges 
in the south-western United States are 
those in the soft volcanic formation in the 
narrow canyons on the eastern slopes of the 
Valles of the great Cochiti Plateau in New 
Mexico, now within the Pajarito National 




H-l 



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£ S? 

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o M 



ifrrfmttive Ihouse JBuitber* 165 

Park, and those in the soft sandstone 
ledges along the Rio Verde in Arizona. 

The general subject of the water supply 
of the early inhabitants of this arid region 
may be considered here. It should be 
remembered, first, that the personal re- 
quirements in this respect of these people, 
as of their successors in this desert coun- 
try, should not be judged by the standard 
which a more advanced culture and a 
different climate impose; second, that 
few arid regions are actually as devoid 
of water as they seem to be, and that a 
long and close familiarity with a dry 
country often reveals fairly abundant 
hidden sources of moderate supply. 

It is the failure to take account of these 
important considerations which has so 
often led to the belief that in the time of 
these early residents the climate must 
have differed essentially from the present 
with a much more abundant rainfall. 



i66 tibe Great plateau 

But while this is a natural first impression 
it is not sustained by a careful and ex- 
tended study of the region and the ruins. 

If, as has often been the case, one 
cherishes the notion that the defensive 
motive was dominant in the selection of 
sites and in the construction of buildings, 
and further, that these dwellings are to 
be regarded as largely fortresses which were 
in a state of frequent and prolonged be- 
leaguerment, the necessity in certain in- 
stances of more numerous and more 
abundant water sources might be conceded. 
But in the majority of instances the 
defensive character of the sites and build- 
ings does not seem to be at all obvious nor 
the evidence of frequent sieges at all clear. 

In fact, some of the larger pueblos, as 
well as many of the larger valley villages, 
are close beside living streams or sandy 
stream-beds which bear abundant currents 
just beneath the surface. Furthermore, 



primitive Ibouse JButtbers 167 

many of the large recesses in the walls of 
canyons and gulches in which the cliff 
dwellings are built furnish a constant 
trickle of water from the rock strata in 
their depths — to whose action, indeed, in 
many instances the weathering of the 
rocks into cave-like recesses has apparently 
been largely due. 

It should also be remembered that dry 
as many of the great sand bottomed 
washes and canyons may appear, there is 
along many of them a steady deep flow of 
ground water which collects here and 
there, where the rock bottom rises, in 
great underground pockets beneath the 
stream-beds or valley bottoms and comes 
out at times upon the surface. 

The ancient resident of this district 
doubtless knew as well as his successor, 
the Navajo, knows, exactly where very 
little digging in an apparently absolutely 
dry, sandy stream-bed would furnish an 



1 68 ZTbe Great plateau 

abundant and unfailing supply of water. 
It is illuminating in this connection to 
travel with a Navajo Indian over the 
desert country and see how often a little 
scraping in the dry sand which has blown 
across the foot of a rock ledge or has 
gathered in a stream-bed along which 
you may have been riding for miles, 
desperately athirst, will reveal a trickle of 
water running away just beneath the 
surface. Many of the old springs near the 
ruins, which constant use would keep 
open, are now no doubt covered with sand 
drift. 

The more familiar one becomes with 
this country the less keen is his surprise 
at the occurrence of a little water in what 
seem the most unlikely situations. This 
is a land of vast erosion, many thousand 
feet of sedimentary strata have been 
washed away over great areas leaving 
the edges of the remaining portions widely 



primitive Douse Builders 169 

exposed, and one is quite as likely to find 
a spring far up in the glare on the face 
of a great cliff or upon the top of a towering 
butte or mesa as upon the lower levels. 

Nor need one assume that for an essen- 
tially agricultural people, as these old 
inhabitants of the ruin district were, a 
more abundant water supply than now 
exists was necessary. The crops which 
the modern Indian secures in some hot, 
sun-baked sag in the long slopes which 
lead down to the dry stream-beds, and the 
fruit trees which flourish upon the glaring 
sand-dunes, indicate the presence of mois- 
ture in many places not too far beneath 
the parched surfaces to be reached by 
the rootlets of the meagre crop. 

I would not convey the impression that 
the ruin region is well watered. One who 
journeys here even under the most ex- 
perienced guidance has too many memories 
of long privation to be easily led into such 



i76 Ubc Great plateau 

a belief. But there are, in fact, many 
more sources of moderate water supply- 
in all the regions containing many pre- 
historic ruins, than from the general 
aspect of the country would seem possible. 

On the other hand, that water was not 
abundant is evident from the many in- 
stances, to be everywhere seen, in which, 
by the construction of small reservoirs 
and ditches, by the damming of shallow 
sags on exposed rock surfaces, by the 
utilisation of natural and the construction 
of artificial water-pockets, the collection 
of rain-water was frequently resorted to. 

But after all there are many groups of 
dwellings of considerable size and many 
more isolated ruins which appear to be 
far from any source of water supply, and 
here the probability of transportation 
and storage in large jars so frequently 
found in and about ruins must be admitted. 

One of the questions which we are very 



primitive Ibouse Builfcers 1 7 1 

apt to ask a professional archaeologist is, 
how long ago did these people live here. 
And it may not be unjust to say that the 
reserve of his answer seems usually to 
furnish a fair clue as to his knowledge of 
his business. 

In fact some of the ruins in the Rio 
Grande Valley were occupied long after 
the Spaniards came and show distinct 
suggestions of their culture. Other build- 
ings were in ruins when the Spaniards first 
passed them. Back of this the probable 
age of the ruins must remain largely 
conjectural until a more careful and 
systematic study shall have been made of 
such marks of this early culture in all 
parts of the ruin region as the hands of 
the vandals may have spared. 

But the well preserved condition of 
some of the older types of ruins and the 
ceremonial and household utensils which 
have been found in them would not pre- 



1 7 2 tlbe (Breat plateau 

elude the conclusion, should this be 
justified on other grounds, that several, 
perhaps even many centuries have passed 
since this special phase of early culture 
gained a foothold in these austere recesses 
of America. 

Most of the prehistoric ruins of the 
south-west are given over to-day to un- 
bridled vandalism. A pot or a skull is 
worth a few dimes to the trader and a 
few dollars to the tourist, and so has been 
evolved the holiday and the professional 
pot-hunter. Everywhere the ruins are 
ravaged. More is destroyed in the search 
than is saved. No records are kept. But 
worse than this the Indian, in whose 
domain are many of the most interesting 
ruins, has learned his lesson from the 
white brother, and has learned it well. 

A few years ago the Indian stood in 
superstitious dread of these ruins and of 
all that they contained, especially of the 



primitive t>ouse 3Buitoer5 173 

human bones which were now and then 
washed out. So potent was this dread 
that in the earlier days in the Indian coun- 
try I have left valuable provision and 
other tempting booty for days together, 
piled up under canvas with the lower jaw 
bone of a " Cliff-dweller," carried along for 
this purpose, placed ostentatiously on top 
of the heap. The cache was invariably 
visited in our absence by our prowling 
brown brethren, whose tracks were quite 
in evidence close by. But I never lost 
an article thus guarded. 

Now, however, all is changed. The 
Indian, particularly the Navajo, has 
learned that no harm seems to come to 
the white man from handling these ancient 
bones, and carrying off the contents of 
the ruins and the graves. They have 
been employed by the whites in ex- 
cavations. So, at last, they too have 
begun to dig and devastate on their own 



174 XTbe Great plateau 

account, destroying great amounts of 
valuable relics. I have learned of one 
instance in which a Navajo has gone at a 
great burial mound with plough and 
scraper destroying many valuable pieces 
of pottery, and securing a few intact, 
which were sold to a trader for a trifling 
sum. 

Steps have already been taken to protect 
by national legislation some of the ruins 
which lie within the forest and Indian 
reserves. But the country is so vast arid 
lonesome that the policing even of these 
regions is very difficult, and more, much 
more, must be done, and that speedily, if 
we would save our precious heritage. 

It is, indeed, but broken glimpses of 
the story of the ancient folk which are 
gained by gleanings in these ruins which 
there is not enough public enlightenment 
and interest to save. But when these 
mouldering relics are interpreted in the 




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primitive Ifoouse Builders 1 75 



light of the lore of the living Pueblo Indian 
the story becomes coherent and full of 
significance. By and by, when disin- 
terested intelligence shall more obviously 
leaven our state and national councils, 
the story will be plainer and richer in 
pictures of early life in America. 




yA«*P**t*& 



CHAPTER VIII 

FORGOTTEN PATHWAYS ON THE GREAT 
PLATEAU 

THERE is no chapter in the story 
of early America so rich in adven- 
ture, so tinged with heroism, so 
quaint with tales of the chase of will-o'- 
the-wisps, so full of heartbreaking failures, 
as that which may be gleaned out of the 
old Spanish records of the early explo- 
rations of the plateau country in the 
sixteenth century. 

One may follow to-day the trails along 
which the loyal subjects of Ferdinand and 
Isabella plodded in the old days out of 
Mexico and back again, drink from the 

springs and water holes which tided them 
X7$ 



jforaotten patbwass 177 



over the hot weary miles, and still in the 
crumbling faces of the cliffs along which 
the forgotten pathways ran, he may 
decipher the rudely graven names and 
the meagre stories cut in the idle hour of a 
night or noonday camp, of the soldier, 
the priest, the titled officer on the service 
of God and their gracious Majesties; to 
the end that souls might be saved, new 
countries explored, and incidentally that 
such gold as the barbarians possessed 
might grace new coffers. 

Many of the pathways which the old 
Spaniards followed over the lower seg- 
ment of the plateau were the trails of 
the Pueblo Indians, and back of these 
were the meagre tracks of older people still, 
whose quaint picture writings in shallow 
rock-picked lines upon the cliffs stand cheek 
by jowl to-day with the inscriptions of 
the Dons. 

Some of these ancient pathways, worn 



178 tTbe Great plateau 

first by prehistoric races, followed by 
their successors — still barbaric folk — and 
here and there broadened by the early 
Spanish expeditions, have become modern 
highways or waggon roads and even railway 
beds. But all over the deeper recesses of 
the plateau the ancient trails wind still 
along valleys and canyons, and over the 
upland summits, turning aside to springs 
and water-pockets, now worn deep and 
plain in the softer rock, now faint and 
grass-grown, or lost here and there in 
the sand drift, with no hint in all the 
great sweep of the vision of the bustling 
creature who has crowded the brown man 
into forlorn corners, and only now and 
then in an idle hour rides back through 
the centuries along the pathways the 
old fellows wandered on foot in quaint 
procession or alone. 

It is an interesting fact that it was the 
great arid plains stretching away west- 



fforgotten ipatbwa^s 179 

ward from the Mississippi and Missouri 
rivers up to the eastern foothills of the 
Rocky Mountains, rather than the moun- 
tains themselves, which barred so long an 
exploration of the mysterious country be- 
tween the frontier settlements and the 
far-off Pacific. It is equally interesting 
that these vast plains together with the 
mountains, through the long periods in 
which fairly distinct ethnic groups of 
people were developing, should have held 
asunder the two great classes of American 
aborigines, known as the " Mound-builders" 
east of the mountains, and the "Cave-" and 
11 Cliff-dwellers' ' west, upon the plateau. 

People wise in such lore say that these 
folk, so different in their modes of life 
were probably descended from a common 
source far to the north, wandering down 
on either side of the great plain and moun- 
tain barrier, and finally, without ever inter- 
mingling, became extinct as barbarian 



180 TTbe Great JMateau 

types before the Spanish expeditions 
out of Mexico ushered in the historic 
period in mid-America. 

At last, however, the zeal for explo- 
ration and adventure among the pale-faced 
intruders who had won and settled the 
east broke across the barriers, and the 
tides of trade and emigration swept to 
the western ocean in two great divergent 
streams. The Great Salt Lake Trail fol- 
lowed the Platte River to the north and 
west. The Santa Fe Trail bore south- 
westward, rounding the southern spurs 
of the Rockies into New Mexico, whence 
the way led down the Rio Grande over 
into the Gila valley and so on to the coast. 

Thus a vast, wild region behind the 
mountains which makes up the larger 
part of the Great Plateau lay long undis- 
turbed between the two active routes of 
far western travel. Then, and it seems 
hardly credible to us to-day that it should 



jforaotten patbwass 181 

have been scarcely four decades ago, the 
pack train and the prairie schooner, the 
pony express and the overland mail, gave 
place to the iron highway, and steam 
was king along the great transcontinental 
routes. 

The Union Pacific was first to link the 
eastern and the western oceans, and fol- 
lowed through long stretches the lines 
of the Salt Lake Trail, cutting across the 
upper end of the Great Plateau. Later, 
the Santa Fe Railway, following the line 
of the old trail as far as the City of the 
Holy Faith, pushed on across the lower 
third of the plateau into southern Cali- 
fornia. Other railways now climb the 
Rocky Mountains, skirt the northern 
fringes of the plateau, and join the Union 
Pacific in Utah. The Southern Pacific 
bears away south of the plateau along 
the watershed of the Gila River. 

It is easy to-day, even within the limi- 



i8 2 ttbe (Sreat plateau 

tations of a summer jaunt, for one to 
gather not a little archasologic lore at first 
hand and revel in some of the natural 
grandeurs of the Great Plateau. 

It is the purpose of the writer in this 
and the next chapter to suggest to the 
transcontinental traveller how by not too 
strenuous excursions from his route he 
may enjoy at least some illuminating 
glimpses of the past and the present in 
this austere wonderland. 

Perhaps the best place accessible by 
rail, from which to get a first glimpse of 
the plateau country and the " Cliff-dwell- 
ers " who once flourished there, is the little 
town of Mancos in south-western Colorado. 
It lies upon the very border of the Great 
Plateau where this rests against the slopes 
of the San Juan Mountains, and may be 
reached by the narrow-gauge loop of the 
Denver and Rio Grande Railway from 
Denver or Pueblo. 



jforaotten J>atbwas$ i$ 3 

At Mancos it requires but a few hours 
to get an outfit ready for a trip to the 
fastnesses of the Mesa Verde, some twenty 
miles away, where high in the sides of 
the rough canyons are perched those 
largest and best preserved ruins of the 
" Cliff-dwellers "in the whole country, from 
which in an earlier chapter we have formed 
a picture of the old builder and his homes. 

The trails are steep and rough. One 
must sleep for three or four nights under 
the stars. But blankets and provisions 
for the out-door life go along on pack 
animals, and one would be very tender- 
footish indeed who, man or woman, could 
not under competent guidance make the 
journey in safety and without serious 
fatigue. 

A trip of three or four days from Mancos 
will introduce one to the prehistoric 
ruins of America in their most impressive 
phases, give one a taste of life with a 



184 Ube 6reat plateau 

pack-train out in the open, and some 
glimpses of the plateau which will, if I 
mistake not, be memorable wherever and 
however he may have journeyed before. 

From Mancos one may ride westward 
half a day over into the Montezuma 
valley where just at the foot of the Ute 
Mountain — Sierra El Late — is the Aztec 
Spring ruin, which with its multitude of 
rooms, some of them still intact and 
unexplored, is an excellent type of the 
older communal dwellings joined to form 
one vast stone structure. 

For those who like to brave the sun, 
who do not shun rough fare, are not 
fastidious in drinking water, and can ride 
day after day over a rough, baked, almost 
trackless land, there is a vast region west 
and north-west from Mancos, reaching 
over to the Colorado River and beyond 
which is little visited, full of wild, scarcely 
explored canyons with many prehistoric 




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jforaotten patbwaps 185 



ruins not mentioned in the books, quaint 
carvings on the cliffs and far outlooks from 
volcanic summits and from the rims 
of lofty mesas. 

One of the most noted of the forgotten 
pathways on the Great Plateau drops off 
from the eastern hills at Mancos and bears 
away northwest across the great sage- 
brush upland to the crossing of the Colo- 
rado, far above the head of the Grand 
Canyon. It started at Santa F6, came 
up the Rio Grande and Chama valleys, 
then across country to this point. Its line 
is indicated on the map. 

Over on the plateau, a few miles beyond 
Mancos, the old trail passes the Yellow 
Jacket Springs around which the " Cliff- 
dweller " folk built their houses, and is 
to-day just the narrow meandering track 
with the same dreary outlook across the 
wide reaches of the sage-clad upland 
which old Father Escalante blinked at, 



186 Ube Great plateau 

as with Brother Dominguez and a little 
escort he wandered out from Santa Fe in 
1776. 

They were following the line of an old 
trail to see if they could not find some 
new Indians to gather into the fold and 
a new way to the missions at Monterey 
upon the Pacific. They roamed the coun- 
try to the east of the Green River, north 
of the later line of the trail, straggled over 
into Salt Lake valley, and got down off 
from the high plateaus in Utah. Cold 
weather came on, and they all got very 
hungry and deemed it wise to go back. 
But the stupendous Canyon of the Colo- 
rado was now between them and home, 
and to retrace the long route by which 
they had come was impracticable. So 
they peered and scrambled about the cliffs 
along the gorge, and at last found a crossing 
and won their way in a very demoralised 
state to the Moqui villages, thence along 



jforgotten pathways 187 

an old pathway past Zuni and the famous 
Inscription Rock, and so home to Santa Fe. 

The crossing of the Colorado which they 
found is still called El Vado de los Padres — 
The Crossing of the Fathers — and the route 
which they followed out of Santa Fe and 
across the plateau has long been known 
as the old Spanish Trail to California. 
It crossed the Green River, worked its 
way down through the western reaches 
of the plateau and through the narrow 
intervales of the Wasatch Mountains, 
whence it bore off down the Virgen River 
and across the country toward what is 
now Los Angeles in the general direction 
followed by the new San Pedro, Los An- 
geles, and Salt Lake Railroad. 

When time or whim, which after all 
should have a good-deal to say about a 
summer wandering, bid one leave Mancos 
for fresh fields, he may be impelled to 
go in quest of the Pueblos. For the key 



188 XTbe Great JMateau 

to the mystery of the " Cliff-dwellers" is to 
be sought in the Pueblo Indians who live 
farther south and east. 

If one seek out these descendants of the 
cliff folk in the Rio Grande valley above 
Santa Fe or at Acoma or Zuni, or better 
still, at the Hopi villages in Arizona, he 
will be able to create for himself a con- 
ception of the old " Cliff-dweller," his ways 
and habits, his play and his religion, his 
utensils and his homes, which will not 
be far from the truth; and one will gain 
an impression of barbarian life very much 
as the wondering Spaniards saw it three 
hundred years and more ago. 

If one have a pack outfit and loves to 
wander, the most attractive way from 
Mancos to reach the Pueblos of the Rio 
Grande, which are most accessible of all, 
is to follow backward the trail of Father 
Escalante, across the foothills of the 
great San Juan Mountains, past the 



forgotten patbwa^s 189 

Pagosa Hot Springs, down the Chama 
valley, by quaint Abiquiu to Espanola in 
the Rio Grande valley. Here, close to 
the Indian villages, accommodation, prim- 
itive but sufficient, can be found for 
men and beasts. 

But the twentieth century offers the 
alternative of steam, and one can reach 
Espanola in a day by rail or he may come 
in a couple of hours by rail from Santa Fe. 

The Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande 
valley hereabouts are simple farmer folk, 
clinging tenaciously to their traditional 
mode of life in adobe houses crowded 
close together, some of which are still 
entered from the flat roof by ladders. 
On feast and dance days, gaudy, fantastic 
dress and weird ceremonial betoken the 
lingering strain of barbarism which, though 
in sight of the railroad and in close touch 
with the white man, links them with the 
days before Columbus came and with 



190 ZTbe (Breat plateau 

the spirit and aspirations of the old 
fellows who built the houses in the cliffs. 

At Espanola teams can be secured and 
competent guidance to the adjacent Indian 
villages. A ramble about the pueblos of 
San Juan, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso 
affords curious glimpses of a phase of 
rude life which is here fast passing away. 

The Spanish conquest of the Pueblos 
in the Rio Grande valley, as elsewhere, 
was only accomplished through the de- 
struction of many towns, so that none 
of the present pueblos are prehistoric 
and none are exactly upon the old sites. 
But the ruins of the old towns are accessible 
and worth a visit. 

As one looks west from Espanola, he 
sees close at hand a series of long, tongue- 
like mesas ending in the valley and sloping 
back to a line of low mountain peaks. 
These are the Valles Mountains and 
between the mesas at their feet are many 



fforgottett patbwass 191 

lonesome canyons. In these some low- 
green trees, a few lofty pines, grass and 
cactus, and in the season jaunty flowers 
hide somewhat the sandy reaches of the 
narrow bottoms and lower the glare of 
the bright yellow cliffs which shimmer 
and scorch in the sun at midday. 

These vivid cliffs are very soft, for they 
are mostly formed of pumice stone, the 
plaything of some volcanic outburst which 
has deluged the land hereabout with 
molten lava and reared low mountains 
over the site of the broken earth. Often 
a little stream gurgles down into the 
heads of these canyons to be soon lost in 
the sand ; more often in the summer they 
are wholly dry. 

It is not because they are picturesque 
little canyons, broiling hot in the midday 
sun and wofully "shy" in water, that I 
invite attention to these recesses in the 
hills near Espanola. For we are now on 



i 9 2 Ubc 6reat plateau 

the eastern edge of the Great Plateau 
over whose whole vast extent are hundreds 
of canyons in themselves far more note- 
worthy. 

But if one climb for a few miles up into 
one of these canyons just above Santa 
Clara, he will presently stand face to face 
with some of the most curious, primitive, 
and fascinating deserted homes which are 
to be found in all America, the homes of 
the " Cave-dwellers.' ' 

In the fronts of the winding cliffs, 
looking out upon the little valleys at their 
feet, are holes of various shapes, big 
enough for a man to crowd through by 
stooping, which lead into cosy little 
chambers within and often into a series 
of these clustered around the opening 
and all pecked out of the friable rock. 
Many of them are smoke-begrimed still, 
in some mud plaster is yet clinging to 
the walls, Small cubby holes here and 




o 

c 

a* 

a, 

•J-l 



fforgotten patbwa^s 193 

there at the sides of the rooms made snug 
places in which to stow away trinkets, 
while fragments of projecting sticks near 
the low ceilings show the method of 
bestowal of scanty wardrobes. A few 
of the dwellings have a small smoke hole 
above the entrance, but for the most part 
the door is door and window and chimney. 

The vivid picture framed by the rude 
doorway of these rock chambers as one 
looks out from their cool recesses upon the 
hot green and yellow reaches of the valley 
and the pine-clad slopes beyond is most 
attractive, and as he lingers within, loath 
again to face the ardent sun, he is ready 
to concede that even the rude lot of the 
old cave man had its compensations. 

In front of many of the caves, piles 
of hewn stone and small timber holes in 
the cliff show that rude stone buildings 
once stood in front covering the doorways 
in the rock. Pottery has been found in 
13 



i94 tlbe (Brcat plateau 

the recesses of some of the caves. Stone 
axes, arrow-heads and pottery fragments 
still are plenty along the foot of the cliffs, 
while picture-writing in the faces of the 
rocks is plain and frequent. 

The swarthy fellows down here in the 
valley of the Rio Grande unfold to-day 
the tradition that it was their people, 
the Cochiti, who long ago in the stress of 
conflict with alien tribes were forced again 
and again to seek these fastnesses and 
make shift to carve a shelter in the cliffs. 
The pottery, the utensils, the masonry, 
and the pictographs upon the rocks con- 
firm the story which science has framed 
from the fading memories of the Queres. 

In this short and easy excursion from 
Espanola to the cave dwellings of the 
Puye, now included in a recently se- 
questered National Reservation — Pajarito 
Park — one gains a vivid conception of 
this curious phase of aboriginal life. There 



Forgotten patbwass 195 

are larger groups of similar dwellings and 
other strange structures in the region 
immediately south between the Great 
White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande 
and the mountains. But the country 
is wild and rough and rarely visited ex- 
cept by old Cochiti veterans who now 
and then slip away on mysterious errands 
to these ancestral haunts. 

Should one, however, be tempted to 
explore them they are best approached 
from Cochiti, whose nearest railway point 
is Thornton on the Santa Fe* Railway. 
With a pack outfit and under the guidance 
of one of the old fathers of Cochiti, one 
may seek out the Painted Cave, the ruins 
of the Tyu-onye, or the Stone Lions of 
Cochiti, and scramble over gigantic ruins on 
the mesa tops where the old pathways are 
worn deep into the rock as they run from 
ruin to ruin, or from the ruins to the water 
sources, or to the places of the shrines. 



196 Ube (Breat plateau 

When one gets home again, he will prob- 
ably read with zest that curious archasologic 
novel by Bandelier, The Delight Makers, 
whose plot is set in the recesses of this 
gashed mountain slope and deals with 
the loves and lives and customs of the 
quaint old people who have gone leaving 
their stuffy homes to silence and the sun. 

From these upper reaches of the Rio 
Grande valley everything gravitates 
towards Santa Fe and the quaint old 
town with its squat adobe Mexican houses 
elbowed into cramped corners by modern 
structures, its old church, its museum, 
and the least imposing palace I fancy 
which the country boasts, may well 
detain the tourist for a day. 




'mlA!**toW 



CHAPTER IX 

ACROSS THE PLATEAU BY RAIL AND TRAIL 

THE Rio Grande valley lies along the 
eastern border of the Great Plateau. 
The traveller westward bound 
across the continent by the Santa F6 
Railway catches his first glimpses of the 
Pueblo Indian villages as he swings from 
the Gallisteo beyond the last spur of the 
Rocky Mountains, into the Rio Grande 
valley. Here he passes close to the 
quaint villages, San Domingo and San 
Felippe. 

From Bernalillo a little farther on one 
may drive up the Jemez Valley and visit 
the pueblos of Santa Ana, Sia, and Jemez 
and the interesting old ruins on the hills 

about them, the wreckage of Spanish 
197 



i9& the <&reat JMateatt 

conquest in the seventeenth century. But 
the train speeds on down the river, the 
level edges of the plateau, here lava- 
capped, building the western horizon 
line. The Sandia Mountains cut short 
the vision toward the east. 

At Albuquerque, the last town of con- 
siderable size this side the Pacific coast, 
one might outfit a pack-train — a stout 
buck-board would answer — for a journey 
of several days up through the valley of 
the Rio Puerco of the East into the heart 
of the plateau to the Chaco Canyon. 

This route leads along old Pueblo and 
Navajo roads, past Cabezon, and across 
the line of the old transcontinental trail 
westward from Santa Fe. It is in part 
the route over which Colonel Washington 
and Lieutenant Simpson and their military 
escort travelled in 1849, to carry an ulti- 
matum to the predatory Navajos, dis- 
covering the wonderful Chaco ruins and 



Across tbe plateau 199 

the cliff houses of the Canyon de Chelly 
westward. 

In the Chaco Canyon and upon the 
adjacent hills is a large group of superb 
prehistoric ruins of great communal houses 
telling of thriving times, of skilful builders, 
of excellent farmers, in the old days when 
all the folks were brown and the brown 
folks owned the earth. One of these 
Chaco ruins containing several hundred 
rooms has been partially explored by the 
Hyde Expedition, whose invaluable col- 
lections are deposited in the American 
Museum of Natural History in New York. 
There is accommodation here to-day at 
the trading post of Richard Wetherill, 
close beside the famous Pueblo Bonito, 
one of the largest of this great ruin 
group. 

The Chaco Valley may be most easily 
reached, however, by team from Chaves 
or Thoreau on the Santa Fe Railway 



200 Ubc Great plateau 

farther west. In any case it is a long hot 
journey over a rough arid country, peopled, 
if at all, by Navajos, and should not be 
undertaken except under skilful guidance 
with a good outfit and an abundance of 
provision. 

A few miles below Albuquerque the 
railroad passes one of the most flourishing 
and most modernised of the Pueblo villages, 
Isleta, leaves the Rio Grande and enters 
the plateau country bearing west. Pres- 
ently it crosses the Rio Puerco of the East, 
so called to distinguish it from a stream 
of the same name over the continental 
divide, and winds up a small branch, 
the San Jos6. 

To the north rises the volcanic crest of 
the San Mateo Mountain, renamed Mount 
Taylor by Simpson in 1849 in honor of 
the President under whose administration 
his explorations in the plateau country 
were conducted. 



1 



■■■■I 




3 1 

o 
o 



4 



across tbe plateau 



20I 



This mountain with its sharp summit 
and long rough spurs standing high upon 
a great mesa top is an impressive type of 
an extinct volcano with hundreds of 
subsidiary outbursts gathered at its feet. 
It was long ago forced up through the pla- 
teau, deluging the land for wide areas with 
lava and thus protecting the surfaces at 
its base from later erosion. But the floods 
and the weather have made away with 
vast areas of strata all about the moun- 
tain, marking its borders with long valleys 
edged with canyons and gorges, and now 
the rugged old sentinel stands up aloft 
looking out over a wilderness of barren land 

The summit is easily accessible in a day 
and a half from Pajuate, a small Pueblo 
farming village at the eastern base, whence 
a good trail leads to the foot of the summit 
spur. Then it is a go-as-you-please scram- 
ble to the top which rises about eleven 
thousand feet above the sea. 



202 XTbe Great plateau 

Save for the summit of the San Fran- 
cisco Mountain in Arizona, I do not know 
of any vantage ground from which one 
may more happily than here look over 
this marvellous land. The vision is in- 
spiring, and if one be new to the allure- 
ments of far horizons swaying in long 
fantastic waves across the hazy reaches 
of the hot south-west; if the earth he 
knows has not dipped her cliffs in sunset 
and set them in lines which beckon on and 
on, he will begin to realise from this, as 
he might from many another pinnacle 
in this lofty wonderland, that in spite of 
its austerities, in spite of its vast arid 
wastes the Great Plateau weaves a spell 
over him who has once shared the spirit 
of its solitudes from which he can never 
again, nor would he willingly, be free. 

San Mateo is one of the sacred moun- 
tains of the Navajo and to its summit 
they, as well as the Pueblo Indians, resort 



across tbe JMatean 203 

for secret ceremonies and especially to 
propitiate and to tell their needs to the 
Powers Above which manage rain. I 
gather from hints, particularly of the 
Navajo, that the night has veiled many 
a weird ceremonial on this narrow moun- 
tain top which, as they tell me, is none of 
the white's man business. In fact, there 
is a small cave or pit in the rock on the 
very summit of the peak just large enough 
for a man to crawl into, with four deep-cut 
pathways leading a few feet away from it 
toward the world corners. I found stuck 
into the rock-debris at the sides of the pit 
several old prayer-sticks of Pueblo manu- 
facture, with the jagged lightning symbol 
cut at one end, the other pointed, the husk 
parcel of sacred meal with which they were 
once furnished mostly weathered off. 

Just at the edge of one of the lava-clad 
tongues which the San Mateo Mountain 
sends off into the San Jose" Valley, the 



204 Ube Great plateau 

railroad cuts through the corner of the 
Pueblo village, Laguna. This is an inter- 
esting excursion centre where temporary 
accommodation and teams may be secured. 

The Laguna pueblo is picturesque and 
rich in curious phases of the village Indian 
life. Here may be seen the making and 
decoration of pottery by hand and its 
primitive firing in the open air. But 
here as elsewhere the elder pottery makers 
are fast disappearing, and a rougher, less 
artistic, less attractive ware is supplanting 
the old. Nevertheless, here and at Acoma 
and Zuni, interesting jars and bowls may 
now and then be found. 

From Laguna one may be taken in a 
farm waggon, perhaps by one of the Indians, 
to the quaint Mexican towns, Cubero and 
Ceboletta, a few miles away. From here 
also one may best secure guidance and 
conveyance for the trip to the summit of 
the San Mateo. 



Heroes tbc plateau 205 



But the little journey from Laguna 
which above all others will be memorable 
ends in that fascinating old "City in the 
Sky" — Acoma. It is some sixteen miles 
from Laguna, the road winding along a 
wide, cliff-bordered valley. It is the same 
old town, perched upon a great sheer 
walled mesa standing high out of the 
valley bottom, which the Spaniards found 
as they came floundering through the 
sand and scrambling over the rocks from 
Cibola, eager for gold, in 1540. Except 
for the far-away Hopi villages, it is the 
most primitive and impressive of the 
pueblos. 

Acoma has been most vividly described 
and its stories and legends rehearsed by 
Lurnmis who knows it and its people well. 
And if one has read, as he who travels in 
this south-west country should, his Spanish 
Pioneers, Strange Corners of our Country, 
and the Land of Poco Tiempo, the ride up 



2o6 XTbe Great plateau 

the valley past the Enchanted Mesa, the 
unfolding of this wonderful old town, the 
glimpses of its quaint folk caught as you 
pass round the foot of the mesa, climb 
the ancient trail to the summit and wander 
among the houses, will frame a memory 
which will seem no part of the land and 
century you know. 

As the necessity for protection has 
disappeared, the Acoma people, as is the 
case of other Pueblos whose old towns 
stand on defensive sites, have gradually 
built summer homes nearer their farms, 
so that the visitor to Acoma in the hot 
season will find many of the houses closed. 
But enough of the people are always 
there to interest the stranger and, it may 
be added, to be interested in him. 

If one can so time his journey as to be 
at hand when the harvest dance is held 
in early September, the people will all be 
there and the quaint life, the weird cere- 



Bcross tbe plateau 207 

monial, and the festive spirit of the hour 
will reveal old Acoma at its best. 

One can drive to Acoma from Laguna, 
wander for two or three hours through 
the town, and return the same evening. 
But it is better to stay over for a night. 

The sunset hour at Acoma with the 
exquisite far outlooks upon valley and 
mesa and mountain; the processions of 
quaintly clad women bringing water in 
great handsome jars poised upon their 
heads; the musical call of the town crier 
as from an housetop he issues some order 
of the Governor, some plan for the mor- 
row's work, some announcement of cere- 
monial to be set afoot; the quaint home 
groups which gather on the housetops at 
dusk laughing and chatting or calling 
from house to house the gossip of the day ; 
a dusky mother crooning to her babe; 
a weird song caught from group to group 
and floating off into the valley ; the glow 



208 TTbe (Breat plateau 

of the lines of bake-ovens along the streets 
as night falls ; the gleaming smoky heaps 
in which pottery is slowly firing under the 
watchful ministrations of old women gath- 
ered close about them; then the great 
silences of the night up on this towering 
rock close under the stars — these, and the 
stir of the new day as the early sun flashes 
from cliff to cliff, are all impressions 
which one were ill-advised to miss. 

Some of the kindly folk can always be 
found who will cheerfully sweep a corner 
of the living room in their terraced houses 
where a blanket may be spread, or point 
out, which I always prefer, a cosy corner 
on the roof where the night may be passed 
in comfort. 

If one should chance, as was once the 
writer's good fortune, to come over on a 
feast day in the autumn with the Padre 
and hear the bells in the great church 
beside the village peal out a welcome as 



across tbe plateau 209 

fc— ■— — — ^ — — i — — — — i— mmmmmmm^m ■— ■ 

the watchers on the cliff catch sight of 
him toiling up the trail, he will not doubt 
that the little French missionary and 
the Church which he personifies have won 
a strong hold upon these simple children 
of the south-west, who find no incongruity 
in reverence for the Cross and regard for 
its ministers, and in a sturdy belief in 
their own Powers Above and an attitude 
towards nature which we others name 
pagan. 

The Padre is coming! The Padre is 
coming! was the meaning of their jubi- 
lant cry as they crowded, big and little, 
men and women, to the head of the trail 
to meet him. The Padre had the best 
room in the village, the whitest bread, 
and the thickest, blackest mutton-stew. 
When he walked about, a score of shrieking, 
giggling brown youngsters, naked or clad 
it matters not, pattered at his heels. He 

does not allow himself to be disturbed if, 
14 



mo trbe Great plateau 

as he celebrates the Mass in the Church, 
some of his restless, inquisitive, blanket- 
clad charges roam about the altar and 
finger with appreciative mien the splen- 
did vestments which his function de- 
mands. 

When their turn comes after the noon, 
and up and down the long streets between 
the strangest dwellings in America the 
fantastic procession of painted men and 
women goes shuffling and singing in the 
weird harvest dance which celebrates and 
solicits the beneficence and good-will of 
powerful Beings in earth and air of whom 
our Scriptures fail to tell and for whom 
we seek in vain among mythologies, 
while the good Padre wanders to and fro 
beaming approval, one wonders and ad- 
mires. One wonders if these are the 
people who used to stone the priests and 
throw them off the great cliffs yonder; 
he cannot fail to admire the adaptability 



Bcross tbe plateau 



of the Church even in our day to unusual 
and complex phases of belief. 

As one leaves Laguna by rail going up 
the valley of the San Jose, if he is interested 
in the outlook with which plodders of 
many sorts and many centuries along the 
forgotten pathways have beguiled the 
weary miles, let it be in the daytime, 
even if one has to take a freight train, 
for just here and for a long way up the 
valley of the San Jos6 ran a noteworthy 
old highway. 

The Pueblo Indians used it in prehistoric 
times as did no doubt the earlier dwellers 
in the cliffs and caves, if they ventured 
so far afield. The Spaniards came this 
way again and again in their early ad- 
ventures on the plateau. Along here 
came Father Escalante floundering wearily 
home to Santa Fe. Many a lonesome 
little caravan and many a solitary fortune- 
seeker, his pack upon his own back, has 



2 1 2 XTbe Great plateau 

passed this way on the long journey from 
Santa Fe to the Pacific, dodging hostile 
Indians, hungry and bedraggled. 

Along here came Lieutenant Simpson in 
1849, homeward bound, after his long 
jaunt into the Navajo country to teach 
those braves manners. Captain Sitgreaves 
and his party passed here in 185 1, by order 
of the Senate to find out where the Zuni 
River went to. Lieutenant Whipple, in 
1854, laid out along the valley the lines 
which the railroad was by-and-by to 
follow. Tired, worn, and ragged, Lieu- 
tenant Ives hurried back down the valley 
from the Colorado River in 1858. 

How many times the Navajo have 
stolen down this way out of their lairs 
among the northern hills to plunder the 
thrifty Pueblos it would not be easy now 
to tell. Then the highway grew wide and 
worn, and great waggon trains from Santa 
F£ bore around the spur of the San 



Bcross tbe plateau 213 

Mateo, heading off up the valley. At 
last the noisy trains began to waken 
strange echoes from the mountain flanks, 
usurping the choicer places as the nar- 
rowing valley climbed the long slopes of 
the Continental Divide, elbowing the old 
pathway unceremoniously aside. 

As one rolls along up the valley, he will 
presently see great jagged black rocks 
crowding close to the rails on either side. 
These are old lava flows, one from the 
plateau of the San Mateo on the right, the 
other, the end of a great stone river which 
has poured out of the earth some twenty 
miles off to the south-west where is a 
beautiful cool spring called the Agua Fria. 
Down it came, this river of fire, full four 
miles wide in many places, sluggish and 
glowing, cooling as it ran until just here 
where the railroad skirts its gloomy 
margins, it grew black and hard and 
stopped. But as the molten lava cooled, 



2i 4 trfoe Great plateau 

— — ^— . — — — — — — — Mia 

its surface was thrown into wild and 
forbidding shapes, black and sinister. 

It is shunned by man and beast, this 
gloomy streak of chaos stretching down 
from the Agua Fria. For the hoof of the 
beast and the foot-gear of the human 
venturing into its recesses are soon cut 
and torn by its jagged edges. One old 
trail goes across the lava flow, formerly 
used by the Zunis and the Acomas when 
they traversed the country to visit and to 
trade. But it is hard to find to-day and 
it is wiser not to try. 

Now at the left, the country rises over 
the long timber-clad slopes of the Zuni 
Mountain which for many miles shuts the 
railroad in against the northern mesas. 

One of the old trails to Zuni and on to 
the Pacific, now a reasonable waggon road, 
goes across the mountain ; another rounds 
its southern end, passing the Agua Fria; 
another leads our way up through Camp- 



Bctos5 tbe plateau 215 

bells' Canyon over the Continental Divide. 
The two former were much frequented 
trails from Coronado's time and before, 
down to the day of the railroad. 

Straight over the mountain not far from 
its farther slope, and some fifty miles 
away, is the famous El Morro or In- 
scription Rock in whose soft cliffs are 
cut strange pictographs of prehistoric 
folk and brief record of their passage, in 
quaint old Spanish script, of many ex- 
peditions out of Mexico in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. Nor is the trace 
of vandals wanting, who have not spared 
to efface some of these priceless records 
of real men that the names of miscreants 
might win enduring shame. 

Noteworthy names are here inscribed; 
names with heroic stories clinging to them ; 
soldiers of fortune and of the Cross in the 
days of our Pilgrim Fathers. For just 
three centuries has the graven record 



2 1 6 Zbc Great plateau 

which I have selected from my photo- 
graphs for reproduction here been exposed 
to the sun and the weather. But the 
shallow lines cut in the soft rock are still 
plain as the picture shows. Founder of 
colonies and of the City of the Holy Faith, 
governor and explorer, Don Juan Onate 
passed this way when our Pacific Ocean 
was just becoming known and was called 
the South Sea. 

El Morro — The Castle, as the Spaniards 
named it — is still miles away from any 
settlement and save for the few scrawls of 
the vandals upon its base there is nothing 
upon or about the rock to indicate to the 
visitor that times have changed. Some 
bedraggled emissary from the Spanish 
Court might for aught that we can see 
file around the corner of the cliff yonder 
in quest of water and camp; still seeking 
the fabled cities of Quivira. There is 
no historic monument in America more 






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Hcross tbe plateau 217 

worthy of preservation than this noble 
collection of autographs and legends of 
the early pioneers. 

Some large ruins crown the top of El 
Morro, and a small pool of water is often 
to be found at its foot. Altogether it 
is one of the most picturesque camping- 
places upon the old pathways of the 
plateau. It may be reached from Zuni 
or from Fort Wingate in a day and the 
way is not hard to find. 

I wandered once across this way from 
Zuni with one of the old men of the tribe, 
hight Mappa-Nutria. A manly, genial, 
white-haired old barbarian he was, who 
muttered prayers and sprinkled sacred 
meal upon the ruins which we passed, 
and, stooping low the while above the 
water, with much mumbling offered to 
the Spirit of the Agua Fria from his 
little treasure bag small pieces of irides- 
cent shell and some excellent fragments 



2 1 8 XLbc (Breat plateau 

of turquoise. I was glad to have so 
earnest an advocate with the Powers which 
kept the beautiful little spring under the 
lava bed wholesome and aflow, but the 
water had become sacred for the time 
and while to drink it was no sin, I 
must perforce go one night with unwashed 
face and hands, for such use was not, he 
said, respectful. I feigned accedence, but 
tried at dusk in surreptitious fashion to 
rinse my finger tips. Old Mappa found 
me out, however, and gave me such a 
spirited wigging, half in Zuni, half in 
Mexican, and all mingled with vivid 
pantomime, for my lack of reverence 
and decency towards the Powerful Ones, 
that I was actually ashamed. And I 
think if I had been possessed of them 
I should then and there have cast some 
little shells and broken turquoise into the 
bubbling water, too, in late extenuation of 
my fault. But I came in sight of the rail- 



Heroes tbe JMateau 219 

road the next day, and then if I had made 
the offering I should perhaps have been 
ashamed again. 

Now for many miles the way of the 
rails lies north of west along a wide valley, 
the Zuni plateau still to the left, and to the 
right one of the most superb reaches of 
stupendous cliffs which the whole land 
affords. Red and grey and brown is 
what one calls them if he is pinned down 
to words. But if one can pass this noble 
palisade at sunset coming east — and it 
is worth while to come back this way 
for this alone — and if as the low sun 
smites them one shall see the majestic, 
winding faces of the cliffs rise and glow 
with a palpitating splendour almost un- 
earthly, he will realise that one more link 
has been forged in the chain which hence- 
forth shall hold the spirit subject to the 
matchless beauty of the Great Plateau. 

The traveller by rail is presently over 



220 xrbe (Breat UMateau 

the divide and going down hill with the 
water courses which lead to the Pacific. 
The great cliffs at the north dwindle, the 
Zuni Mountain falls away, and the train 
goes thundering down the valley of the 
Rio Puerco of the West. 

Before one gets down to Gallup in the 
valley of the Puerco, he must make up his 
mind whether the time or money or whim 
are consenting to a trip to Zuni ; for if it is 
yes, Gallup with its livery stable and neces- 
sary outfit is the best place to stop. 

Zuni lies about forty miles to the south 
of Gallup, over a fair waggon road. The 
pueblo is in a broad brown valley not so 
picturesque as Acoma, like it half deserted 
in summer, with a type of face and form, 
a style of pottery and architecture, and 
hosts of superstitions all its own. A group 
of ruins near the modern Zuni is all that is 
left of one of the famous seven cities of 
Cibola of early Spanish days. But one 



Across tbe JMateau 2 2 1 

may find the others if he be not afraid 
to wander in the sun. The Zunians will 
point out a rude pile of stones a few 
hundred yards from the village, which 
is the centre of the world. 

One may climb the rude ladders and 
wander on the terraced roofs up to the 
fifth story and look across the shimmering 
valley to a grand old mesa standing 
alone — the Thunder Mountain of their 
legends. The visitor will be welcome — 
doubly so if he discreetly dispense 
some small offerings of sweets and 
tobacco — to the snug abodes of the various 
clans, and may gain entrance to the 
gloomy chambers under ground in which 
at times weird ceremonies are conducted. 
If one be missionaryly inclined, he will call 
upon the ladies at the school and admire 
the spirit and beneficence of their work. 

One finds here in Mr. D. D. Graham, an 
Indian agent whose example of honest, 



222 zrbe Great plateau 

vigilant, and sympathetic administration 
offers the simple and effective solution 
of the Indian problem. For the problem 
lies not so much in the Indian as in se- 
curing and properly supporting an honest 
and capable representative of the Federal 
Government, and for lack of this in many in- 
stances we have suffered national disgrace. 

One may ride in a day from Zuni to In- 
scription Rock along the old pathway 
which the early Spaniards trod and return 
to Gallup, if he will, by the way of Fort 
Wingate. 

When the wanderer gets back to Gallup 
and the railroad, he will doubtless be 
weary of the rough roads and the ardent 
sun, and impatient for the train which is 
to carry him to " somewhere. " But before 
he goes he should look across the narrow 
valley to the cliffs beyond through which 
an old road leads to Fort Defiance in the 
Navajo Reservation, a day's journey away. 









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Bcross tbe IMateau 223 

The old army post at Fort Defiance is 
now abandoned by the soldiers but is an 
agency for the Navajo Indians. It is a 
typical frontier military post, with the 
little houses grouped around a square, 
its barracks, its stables, and now the 
school. One would not be tempted to 
brave the sun for this alone. But a day's 
ride beyond the post, along a fascinating 
old trail which in its time has seen many 
a quaint procession, will bring the rider 
to one of the grandest canyons in the 
whole plateau, next to the matchless one 
which lies upon the flanks of the great 
Colorado. It is the Canyon de Chelly, in 
whose recesses are hundreds of ruins of 
the prehistoric people. A few Navajo 
live here during the summer and cultivate 
the fertile patches in the bottom which 
the old folks owned and tilled in the days 
which are forgotten. 

The Canyon de Chelly can be approached 



224 tEbe Great plateau 

from Santa Fe or from Albuquerque by 
way of the Chaco, along the old trails 
already mentioned. I have come to it 
over the hot miles out of Colorado and 
the San Juan Valley. The easiest approach 
is from Gallup by way of Fort Defiance; 
but if one be in command of a pack outfit 
the trip to the Chelly is worth the toil it 
costs to reach it, whichever way he comes. 
Again aboard, the train speeds down 
the Puerco Valley, past Navajo Spring 
which has been the scene of many a 
rendezvous of Indians and of white men 
in the old days. Down here ran the old 
trail from Cibola to Tusayan — the land of 
the Hopi — along which the eager Spaniards 
toiled in the sixteenth century, hoping 
that at Tusayan they might find that 
golden storehouse of their dreams which 
at Cibola had faded into a tangle of mud 
houses with vociferous brown folk swarm- 
ing over the roofs and heaving rocks down 



across tbc plateau 225 

upon their heads. But it was not much 
better at Tusayan whence some pushed 
on west in quest of rumoured giants, but 
found only the gigantic chasm of the great 
Colorado from which they could not even 
slake their thirst, so monstrous were the 
precipices at whose feet the river roared 
and tossed. Then they all came sadly 
back this way to Cibola to wander off 
again far eastward in the vain quest of 
cities and treasures which were chimeras. 
From Adamana in a day one may visit 
the Petrified Forest, survey noteworthy 
ruins of the elder folk, and see some 
excellent ancient pictographs upon the 
faces of the ledges. 

Presently the valley widens, the country 
stretches away grey and hazy on either 
hand, and the train is winding along the 
Rio Colorado Chiquito — The Little Red 
River, or as we now call it, the Little 
Colorado. From the vicinity of Winslow 
15 



226 Zbc Great plateau 

one may look down the valley of the Little 
Colorado across the forbidding reaches of 
the Painted Desert to the brown and red 
buttes between which a way leads up to 
Tusayan. 

The Little Colorado winds in placid 
fashion through the sand for a few miles, 
then strikes the lava flows from the San 
Francisco Mountain, drops into an unas- 
suming canyon which gradually deepens 
until at last it is a straight walled gorge, 
less than a mile wide at its rim and full 
three thousand feet in sheer depth. The 
adventurer in this country of precipices 
and gorges gets wonted to dizzy trails and 
shivery depths close at his feet, but he who 
without flinching can peer over the edge 
of the Little Colorado gorge may be cer- 
tain that he has sustained the supreme 
test. These lower reaches of the Little 
Colorado are most conveniently visited 
from the Grand View Hotel at the Grand 



Hcross tbe plateau 227 

Canyon along an old Moqui trail. Many 
ruins of the ancient people lie in the Little 
Colorado Valley not far from Winslow 
and along the stretches a few miles north 
of the railroad. 

As one leaves Winslow, looking out of the 
car window ahead and to the left, he sees a 
break in the lines of the buttes through 
which the old Sunset Pass Trail, and later 
a mail and waggon road entered the great 
Mogollon Forest on the way to the Verde 
Valley and the country beyond. This 
old highway, like many another which the 
railroad has crowded aside, is followed 
now and then by the cattlemen driving 
in their unruly charges from the forest 
ranges. But it is now rough and over- 
grown and the great pines are claiming 
their own again. 

Now the railroad climbs up on to the 
mesa out of the valley of the Little Colo- 
rado, up into the pine forest, up among 



228 XEbe Great plateau 

a wilderness of cinder cones, to the foot 
of the grand old volcano, the beautiful 
San Francisco Mountain. Here the homely 
little town of Flagstaff, in the name of the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado to which 
it was so long the popular gateway; in 
the name of the superb view from the 
mountain top; in the name of cliff dwell- 
ings and cave dwellings, and many an 
alluring forest drive, invites the traveller 
to break his journey westward. 

From Flagstaff, by waggon or ahorse, one 
may cross the great Mogollon Forest 
southward into the Verde Valley and the 
land of the Apache, visiting Montezuma's 
well and castle and the cave dwellings 
of the Verde. Thence by the old Govern- 
ment road one may cross over the hills to 
the Tonto Basin and the curious natural 
bridge, and so back again to Flagstaff 
another way. 

An old waggon road " Beales Waggon 



Bcross tbc plateau 229 

Road," straggling westward from Santa 
Fe, around the San Mateo Mountain by 
the Agua Fria and Inscription Rock via 
Zuni, Navajo Spring, and the valley of the 
Little Colorado, comes close to the railroad 
just as it turns the spur of the peak to 
enter Flagstaff. Farther west it bears off 
to the right, skirting the edges of the 
Coconino Forest, on the way to the crossing 
of the Big Colorado. 

Beyond Flagstaff the railroad makes 
its devious way westward. 

At Williams a branch road leads to the 
very rim of the Grand Canyon some 
sixty miles across the Coconino plateau, 
where are hotels, saddle-horses, guides, 
and all necessary as well as many un- 
necessary conveniences for excursions 
along and into the Canyon. One should 
not permit either the world, the flesh, or 
any other potency to call him back in less 
than a week from this inspiring region. 



230 XTbe Great plateau 

Now the railroad drops comfortably 
down from the plateau, and comes at last 
to the crossing of the Colorado River below 
the Grand Canyon where the sullen, 
muddy water laps ignominious shores with 
no suggestion of the glorious chasm which 
it has helped to sculpture. Then the 
desert, then the Garden of America in 
Southern California, then the Pacific. 
| But the most interesting excursion of 
all those which may be made from the 
Santa Fe Railway as a base remains to be 
described. It is to the far-away Hopi or 
Moqui villages, the ancient Tusayan, about 
one hundred miles north over a rough arid 
upland with few watering places and at 
best a hot, hard ride. 

Although the Hopi Pueblos were among 
the earliest to be seen by the Spaniards and 
were quickly brought into nominal sub- 
jection, they maintained their isolation 
throughout the period of Spanish rule and 



' 




Hopi Folks. 

The whorls of hair at the side of the head indicate that the wearer 

is unmarried. 



Heroes tbe plateau 231 

it was not until the explorations for the 
transcontinental railroad route, midway 
in the last century, that their modes of 
life and points of view became markedly 
modified by intercourse with the whites. 
They are still too far from lines of travel 
to be visited frequently. The result is 
that the Hopi settlements of to-day re- 
veal the village Indian in his most prim- 
itive aspects with his traditions and myths 
and barbaric ceremonials but superficially 
modified by ingrafts of the white mans 
point of view. 

While traces of the Roman Catholic 
Church are interwoven in very complex 
fashion with the religious conceptions 
and even in some degree with the primitive 
ceremonials of all the other existing 
Pueblo Indians, the Church has from the 
first secured but a superficial and fitful 
foothold among these people. Within the 
past few years, it is true, the establishment 



232 Ubc Great plateau 

of schools and government agencies and 
the more frequent visits of the whites have 
profoundly modified the dress, the material 
aspirations, and the conceptions of the 
great world of men beyond the immediate 
vision of the Hopi. But here in his snug 
houses with their terraced stories, perched 
upon great bare mesas is that by which 
we may most closely link the present with 
the genuine barbarian of a high order who 
saw the coming of the white man into his 
contented seclusion along the same old 
pathways by which the visitor comes 
to-day, straggling along under the cliffs, 
hot and dusty and athirst. 

The Hopi man is a farmer still, but is 
beginning to cast aside his primitive uten- 
sils for the white man's farming tools. 
He is a genial, hospitable pagan, fun- 
loving in his way, loyal to his family, and 
closely linked in every act and purpose 
and aspiration with potent Beings in earth 



across tbe plateau 233 

and air and sky which he consults, worships, 
placates, holding them in close communion 
through quaint and weird ceremonials 
which age by age have been handed down 
at last to him. His women folk are al- 
together not uncomely, the youngsters 
just gurgling, playing, laughing young- 
sters, in aspect much like others who are 
white save for the accident of colour and 
garb. 

While the relatively unalloyed traditions 
of the Hopi offer a field for the student of 
folk-lore among the Pueblo Indians of 
exceptional extent and value, the ordinary 
visitor touches but superficially upon the 
inner life of the people. He is indeed 
constantly impressed with a mysterious 
underlying current of life and impulse 
which is opened only to such as can win 
their confidence, understand their speech, 
and are trained to recognise the value and 
significance of their lore. But certain of 



234 Ube Great plateau 

the Hopi ceremonials, especially the so- 
called Snake Dance, which is really an 
elaborate prayer for rain, are so weird and 
striking that for several years white men 
have gathered in considerable numbers 
to witness them. 

The Snake Dance has been frequently 
described. The scene at an absorbing 
moment has been caught by Lungren 
upon his great, well-known canvas. Photo- 
graphs of various phases of the ceremonial 
are abundant. To the repeated pains- 
taking observations and the learned treat- 
ises of Dr. Fewkes we owe the most 
comprehensive exposition of the weird 
ceremonial and its lore. 

I shall not here describe the Snake 
Dance nor attempt to indicate the pro- 
found impression which this relic of 
barbarism makes upon the sympathetic 
beholder. To the many, the appearance 
and the handling of snakes, both harmless 




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Bcross tbe plateau 235 

and venomous, in the culminating phases 
of the intricate and prolonged ceremonial 
is the chief and absorbing attraction. 
But to him who has come to know the 
participants in their daily walks, and 
realises that the crude barbaric exhibition 
is but the expression handed on through 
centuries, of sincerely cherished and pro- 
found religious conceptions; to him who 
now and again as the strange processions 
out of the slumbering centuries unfold 
before him at sunset finds the eye 
wandering out upon the hazy valleys and 
over the quavering uplands under whose 
sway the conceptions here dramatised 
were evolved or fostered : to him who has 
grown even fond of these children of the 
sun, for their simplicity, directness, 
and familiar intercourse with Beings out 
of sight but ever close at hand which rule 
the world, — the Snake Dance ceremonial 
has a more absorbing and abiding fasci- 



236 Gbe ©reat flMateau 

nation than its crude dramatic features 
can awaken. 

There are seven of the Hopi villages, and 
at some of these the Snake Dance cere- 
monial is held each year between the 
middle and the end of August. 

For the journey out to Hopi and back 
one should take at least a week. It can 
be made from Flagstaff or Canyon Diabolo 
or Winslow or Holbrook or Gallup, either 
on horseback or by waggon, and usually 
one or more conveyances go from each of 
these places. Almost all of these routes 
follow in the main the lines of old Indian 
trails and lead by the ancient watering 
places which till fifty years or so ago only 
the brown man and the Spaniard knew. 
Agents of the Santa Fe* Railway can give 
information regarding routes and have 
issued an interesting short description of 
the Snake Dance by Hough. 

It is disheartening to realise, as the 



Serosa tbe JMateau 237 

thoughtful visitor to the lingering remnants 
of a vanishing race in our western country- 
is forced to do, that priceless treasures of 
folk-lore are each year slipping away out 
of sight forever as one by one their swarthy 
old custodians drop away. It is to be 
hoped that general enlightenment among 
the people of the land may demand, ere 
it be too late, such liberal appropriations 
for the maintenance of devotees to Ameri- 
can Anthropology in these lonesome fields 
as shall be more worthy a nation so great 
as ours and with aspirations not all for 
material conquest, whatever may be the 
apparent leaning of the hour. 

The writer is certain that he who shall 
break his long transcontinental journey 
for one or all of the glimpses of life and 
nature on the Great Plateau which these 
pages have aimed to suggest, will win some 
lasting and inspiring memories and a deeper 
love of the great land which we inherit. 




1**t 



INDEX 



Acoma, 205 
Adamana, 225 
Albuquerque, 198 
Aqua Fria, 213, 217 



Bandelier, 29, 196 

Bass's Camp, 67 

Beak's Waggon Road, 228 

Bluff City, 43 

Bright Angel Creek, 59 



Cabezon, 198 

Canyon, Campbell's, 215; Cataract, 40; Chaco, 198; 
de Chelly, 223; Glen, 40; Grand, of the Colorado 
River, 42; access to, 37; cliff-houses of, 66; des- 
criptions of, 62; Forest Reserve of, 43; geology 
of, 72; hotels at, 37, 67; wanderings about, 65; 
Little Colorado, 226; Marble, 42; White Rock of 
Rio Grande, 195 

Cataract Creek, 66 

Cave Dwellings, 145, 163, 192 

Cibola, 220, 224 

Cliff-Dwellers, baskets of, 123; bone implements of, 
127; burials of, 150; cave ruins of, 159; character- 
istics of, 104, 129; dress and adornments of, 105; 
firesticks of, 112; homes of, 96, 137; land of, 92; 
masonry of, 108, 148; open ruins of, 140, 146; 
pictographs of, 115; pottery of, 119; sandals of, 

239 



24o fln&es 



105; stone implements of, 113; towers of, 157; 
utensils of, 113 ; water supply of, 165 

Cliff Dwellings, 90, 137; classification of , 143; van- 
dalism in, 172 

Cochiti, 194; stone lions of, 195 

Coconino Basin, 66; Forest, 229 

Colorado Chiquito, 42, 225 

Colorado River, canyons of, 40; crossings of, 41, 
43, 187; sources of, 40 

C us king, 29 



Dandy Crossing, 40 
"Delight Makers," 196 
Dellenbaugh, 60 
Dirty Devil Creek, 40 
Dorsey, 29 
Dutton, 65 



E 



Echo Cliffs, 60, 68 

El Morro, 215 

El Tovar Hotel, 37, 59, 67 

Escalante, Father, 185 

Espanola, 189 

Estufa, hi, 150 



F 



Fewkes, 29, 234 
Flagstaff, 228 
Ft. Defiance, 222 
Ft. Wingate, 217 



Gallup, 220 

Gila River, ruins on, 138 

Graham, 221 

Grand View Hotel, 38, 65, 67, 226 



H 



Hodge, 29 

Hopi Indians, 132, 230 

Hough, 236 

Hyde Exploring Expedition, 199 



Indians, Apache, 35; Havasupai, 35, 66; Hopi, 
132, 231; Navajo, 30; Pah Utes, 34; Pueblo, 
26, 131, 132, 189, 231; Ute, 34; Wallapai, 35 

Inscription Rock, 215 

Isleta, 200 



Ives, 212 



Kanab, 53 
Kiva, see Estufa 



K 



L 



Laguna, 204 

Lava Beds, 213 

Lee's Ferry, 41 

Little Colorado River, 225 

Lummis, 29, 205 

M 

Mancos, 182 

Matthews, 29 

Mesa, enchanted, 206 

Mesa Verde, 100, 159, 183 

Mogollon Forest, 227 

Montezuma, castle and well, 228 

Monument Valley, 86 

Mound-Builders, 179 

Mountains, Blue, 15; Carriso, 15; Henry, 51; La 
Sal, 15; Navajo, 41, 68; Sandia, 198; San Fran- 
cisco, 228; San Juan, 188; San Mateo, 200; 
Taylor, 200; Thunder, 221; Ute, 184; Valles, 190; 
Zuni, 214 



242 1Tn&e£ 

N 
Navajo Indians, 30; spring, 224 

O 
Onate, Inscription of, 216 



Painted Desert, 66, 68, 226 

Pajarito Park, 164, 194 

Petrified Forest, 225 

Pictographs, 115, 225 

Plateau, Buckskin, 55; Cochiti, 1 64 ; Great American, 
access to, 8; across, 197; animals of, 10; camp- 
ing on, 22; characters of, 1, 14; colours of, 14; 
ethnology of, 27; forgotten pathways of, 176; 
formation of, 4, 77; fossils of, 79; Indians of, 5, 
25 ; mirage of, 18; mountains of, 15 ; railways of, 
181 ; settlement of, 179; showers of, 19; trails of, 
180, 185,227; travel on, 9, 13; vegetation of , 2; 
water of, 10, 21, 165; High, of Utah, 82; Kaibab, 
55; Marble, 68; Powell, 57 

Points: Final, Greenland, Royal, and Sublime, 58 

Powell, 40, 45, 64 

Pueblo Bonito, 199 

Pueblo villages: Acoma, 205; Cochiti, 195; Hopi, 
230; Isleta, 200; Laguna, 204; Moqui, 230; of the 
Rio Grande, 190, 197; Zuni, 220 



Rio Grande, ruins in valley of, 138 

Rio Puerco, 198, 200, 220 

River, Colorado, 40; Colorado Chiquito, 225; Dirty 
Devil, Fremont, 40; Gila, 139; Green and Grand 
40; Kanab, 138; Salt, 139; San Jos6, 211 j San 
juan, 41, 138; Virgen, 138 

Ruins, protection of, 172 



1Fnfce£ 243 



Santa Fe\ 196 
Simpson, 198, 212 
Sit greaves, 212 
Snake Dance, 234 
Spanish Bayonet, 124 
Stanton, 45 
Stephen, 29 
Stevenson, 29 

T 

Thornton, N. M., 195 

Thoreau, N. M., 200 

Tonto Basin, 228 

Trail, Great Salt Lake, 180; Old Spanish, 185; San< 

ta F6, 180; Sunset Pass, 227 
Tuba City, 61 
Tusayan, 224 
Tyu-onye\ ruins of 195 



Verde valley, 165, 228 

W 

Warner, 64 
Washington, Col., 198 
Wetherill, 199 
Whipple, 212 
Williams, Ariz., 37, 229 
Winslow, Ariz., 225 



Yellow Jacket Spring, 185 
Yucca, uses of by Cliff -man, 124 



Zum, 220 



The Romance of the 
Colorado River : : : 

A Complete Account of the Discovery and of the 
Explorations from 1540 to the Present Time, 
with Particular Reference to the two Voyages of 
Powell through the Line of the Great Canyons 

By Frederick S. Dellenbaugh 

' S°, with 200 Illustrations ', net, $3.50. By mail, $3.75 



" As graphic and as interesting as a novel. . . . Of especial value 
to the average reader is the multiplicity of pictures. They occur on 
almost every page, and while the text is always clear, these pictures 
give, from a single glance, an idea of the vastness of the canyons and 
their remarkable formation, which it would be beyond the power of 
pen to describe. And the color reproduction of the water-color draw- 
ing that Thomas Moran made of the entrance to Bright Angel Trail 
gives some faint idea of the glories of color which have made the 
Grand Canyon the wonder and the admiration of the world." — The 
Cleveland Leader. 

*' His scientific training, his long experience in this region, and his 
eye for natural scenery enable him to make this account of the Col- 
orado River most graphic and interesting. No other book equally 
good can be written for many years to come — not until our knowl- 
edge of the river is greatly enlarged. " — The Boston Herald. 



SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED DESCRIPTIVE CIRCULAR 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

New York London 



The North Americans of 
Yesterday ::::::::: 

A Comparative Study of North American 
Indian Life, Customs, and Products, on 
the Theory of the Ethnic Unity of the Race 

By Frederick S. Dellenbaugh 

With about 350 illustrations, 8° , net, $4.00 



" For its thoroughness, the scientific spirit in which it is written and 
in which the studies on which it is based were made, the book can- 
not fail to take high rank in its field of literature." — Buffalo Express. 

*' It is a very interesting, very instructive and authoritative work on 
a subject we should pay more attention to." — Boston Times. 

14 Mr. Dellenbaugh's book is the most satisfactory volume that the 
new study has evoked. It is full of facts which are agreeably but 
forcibly presented. Without seeking controversy it takes bold posi- 
tions and works from their standpoint, and it is graced by a wealth 
of illustration." — Transcript, Portland, Me. 

" The first great merit of the book is that it is strictly impartial, 
written from a viewpoint midway between that of the white man 
who has rarely treated the Indian or his history justly, and that which 
the Indian himself would be supposed to take were he to write his 
history. And the author's treatment of the red man it must be ad- 
mitted is just." — Grand Rapids Herald. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

New York London 



Dec** ia* 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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